ith some dressed
flax. After it was over she led me to the river, that I might wash
myself, for it had made me completely blind, and then conducted me to a
great fire. They now returned us all our clothes, with the exception of
our shirts, which the women kept for themselves, wearing them, as we
observed, with the fronts behind.

"We were now not only tattooed, but what they called tabooed,[S] the
meaning of which is, made sacred, or forbidden to touch any provisions
of any kind with our hands. This state of things lasted for three days,
during which time we were fed by the daughters of the chiefs, with the
same victuals, and out of the same baskets, as the chiefs themselves,
and the persons who had tattooed us. In three days, the swelling which
had been produced by the operation had greatly subsided, and I began to
recover my sight; but it was six weeks before I was completely well. I
had no medical assistance of any kind during my illness; but Aimy's two
daughters were very attentive to me, and would frequently sit beside me,
and talk to me in their language, of which, as yet, however, I did not
understand much."

The custom of marking the skin, called _tattooing_, is one of the most
widely-diffused practices of savage life, having been found, even in
modern times, to exist, in one modification or another, not only in most
of the inhabited lands of the Pacific, from New Zealand as far north as
the Sandwich Isles, but also among many of the aboriginal tribes both of
Africa and America. In the ancient world it appears to have been at
least equally prevalent. It is evidently alluded to, as well as the
other practice that has just been noticed, of wounding the body by way
of mourning, in the twenty-eighth verse of the nineteenth chapter of
Leviticus, among the laws delivered to the Israelites through
Moses:--"Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor
print any marks upon you," both of these being doubtless habits of the
surrounding nations, which the chosen people, according to their usual
propensity, had shown a disposition to imitate.

The few civilized communities of antiquity seem to have been all of them
both singularly incurious as to the manners and conditions of the
barbarous races by whom they were on all sides so closely encompassed,
and, as might be expected, extremely ill-informed on the subject; so
much so, as has been remarked by an author who has written on this topic
with admirable