tay indoors and in the dark and cover
themselves with a large mat reaching to the ground. But the widow goes
every day, covered with her mat, to weep at the grave; this she does
both in the morning and in the afternoon. During this time of mourning
the next of kin may not eat certain succulent foods, such as yams,
bananas, and caladium; they eat only the gigantic caladium, bread-fruit,
coco-nuts, mallows, and so forth; "and all these they seek in the bush
where they grow wild, not eating those which have been planted." They
count five days after the death and then build up great heaps of stones
over the grave. After that, if the deceased was a very great man, who
owned many gardens and pigs, they count fifty days and then kill pigs,
and cut off the point of the liver of each pig; and the brother of the
deceased goes toward the forest and calls out the dead man's name,
crying, "This is for you to eat." They think that if they do not kill
pigs for the benefit of their departed friend, his ghost has no proper
existence, but hangs miserably on tangled creepers. After the sacrifice
they all cry again, smear their bodies and faces all over with ashes,
and wear cords round their necks for a hundred days in token that they
are not eating good food.[581] They imagine that as soon as the soul
quits the body at death, it mounts into a tree where there is a bird's
nest fern, and sitting there among the fronds it laughs and mocks at the
people who are crying and making great lamentations over his deserted
tabernacle. "There he sits, wondering at them and ridiculing them. 'What
are they crying for?' he says; 'whom are they sorry for? Here am I.' For
they think that the real thing is the soul, and that it has gone away
from the body just as a man throws off his clothes and leaves them, and
the clothes lie by themselves with nothing in them."[582] This estimate
of the comparative value of soul and body is translated from the words
of a New Hebridean native; it singularly resembles that which is
sometimes held up to our admiration as one of the finest fruits of
philosophy and religion. So narrow may be the line that divides the
meditations of the savage and the sage.

When a Maewo ghost has done chuckling at the folly of his surviving
relatives, who sorrow as those who have no hope, he turns his back on
his old home and runs along the line of hills till he comes to a place
where there are two rocks with a deep ravine between them. He lea