and nobody else ever dared to eat them. They thought
it was wrong, and said, if they did, some nameless evil would at once
overtake them. These nameless terrors, these bodiless superstitions, are
always the deepest. People fight hardest to preserve their bogeys.
They fancy some appalling unknown dissolution would at once result from
reasonable action. I tried one day to persuade a poor devil of a fellow
in Samoa who'd caught one of these fish, and who was terribly hungry,
that no harm would come to him if he cooked it and ate it. But he was
too slavishly frightened to follow my advice; he said it was taboo to
the god-descended chiefs: if a mortal man tasted it, he would die on the
spot: so nothing on earth would induce him to try it. Though to be sure,
even there, nobody ever went quite so far as to taboo the very soil of
earth itself: everybody might till and hunt where he liked. It's only in
Europe, where evolution goes furthest, that taboo has reached that last
silly pitch of injustice and absurdity. Well, we're not afraid of the
fetich, you and I, Mrs. Monteith. Jump up on the gate; I'll give you a
hand over!" And he held out one strong arm as he spoke to aid her.

Frida had no such fanatical respect for the bogey of vested interests as
her superstitious brother, so she mounted the gate gracefully--she was
always graceful. Bertram took her small hand and jumped her down on the
other side, while Philip, not liking to show himself less bold than a
woman in this matter, climbed over it after her, though with no small
misgivings. They strolled on into the wood, picking the pretty white
orchids by the way as they went, for some little distance. The rich
mould underfoot was thick with sweet woodruff and trailing loosestrife.
Every now and again, as they stirred the lithe brambles that encroached
upon the path, a pheasant rose from the ground with a loud whir-r-r
before them. Philip felt most uneasy. "You'll have the keepers after
you in a minute," he said, with a deprecating shrug. "This is just full
nesting time. They're down upon anybody who disturbs the pheasants."

"But the pheasants can't BELONG to any one," Bertram cried, with a
greatly amused face. "You may taboo the land--I understand that's
done--but surely you can't taboo a wild bird that can fly as it likes
from one piece of ground away into another."

Philip enlightened his ignorance by giving him off-hand a brief and
profoundly servile account of the Englis