ts eyes rolled, its jaws clashed, and with a scream an
evil human spirit that had lived in its body flew into the air. The
ne'er-do-weel had a royal reception when he returned. Finding that
his old friend, the high priest, was dead, he fulfilled a promise by
secretly burying the magic spear-point in his grave.

Hawaiian Witches

To the native Hawaiian, who shuns work, dresses only for decorative
purposes, and is willing to subsist on fruits that grow without
teasing, life is not so simple as we should suppose, to look at
him. Nature abhors a vacuum, even in a man's head, and when the man
cares to put nothing in his noddle that will increase his understanding
and resource, his ancestry will have planted something there which
is sure to swell and grow until it may dominate his conduct and his
fate. And if you open the head of an average barbarian you will find
a flourishing crop of superstition fungi inside. So surely as he is
a barbarian he will believe in witches. If he contents himself with
imagining wizards and spooks, he may find recreation enough in the
dark, but when he accuses other people of practising against him,
and gets them hanged or roasted, his imagination has become too
frisky to be at large. Death for the practice of witchcraft is no
longer possible, however, unless it results from private revenge.

To this day fear and ignorance paint gnomes and elves in the palm
groves and among the wild Java uplands of the mid-Pacific, and Honolulu
itself is not free from the lingering and traditionary kahuna. This is
the wizard, or medicine man, or voodoo worker, who does by prayer and
spell what his employers would do with a club if it were not for the
awkward institution of the law. When a Kanaka has endured an injury
he hires a kahuna to pray his enemy to death. This imposes on the
victim the necessity of hiring a kahuna to pray down the other one,
or of running away, if he cannot afford the expense. The wizard calls
on his intended victim and tells him what is about to happen, and
you would naturally suppose that the visitee would take the visitor
by the collar and the "bosom of his pants" and persuade him away from
the premises, even if he did not go out and exercise upon him in the
yard. In fact, record has been made of explosive exits of these wizards
from Americans' houses when they made their usual courtesy call before
praying the resident out of existence, and 'tis said that they bore
marks of