ave been very tough," I said.

"He must have been," Haabunai said regretfully. "Grandfather had his
teeth to the last. He would never eat a child. Like all warriors he
preferred for vengeance's sake the meat of another fighter."

He had not yet sprung the grim jest of almost all cannibalistic
narratives. I did not ask if Honi's wife had eaten of him, as had
Tahia of her white man. It is probable that she did, and that they
deceived her. It was the practical joke of those days.

I had seen Apporo, my landlady, staggering homeward a few days
earlier in a pitiful state of intoxication. Some one had given her a
glass of mixed absinthe, vermuth, and rum, and with confidence in
the giver she had tossed it down. That is the kind of joke that in
other days would have been the deluding of some one into partaking
of the flesh of a lover or friend.

Reasoning from our standpoint, it is easy to assume that cannibalism
is a form of depravity practised by few peoples, but this error is
dispelled by the researches of ethnologists, who inform us that it
was one of the most ancient customs of man and began when he was
close brother to the ape. Livingstone, when he came upon it on the
Dark continent, concluded that the negroes came to that horrible
desire from their liking for the meat of gorillas, which so nearly
approach man in appearance. Herodatus, writing twenty-five hundred
years ago, mentions the Massagetae who boiled the flesh of their
old folks with that of cattle, both killed for the occasion.
Cannibalism marked the life of all peoples in days of savagery.

Plutarch says that Cataline's associates gave proof of their loyalty
to that agitator and to one another by sacrificing and eating a man.
Achilles expressed his wish that he might devour Hector. The Kafirs
ate their own children in the famine of 1857, and the Germans ate
one another when starvation maddened them, long after Maryland and
Massachusetts had become thriving settlements in the New World.
There is a historic instance of a party of American pioneers lost in
the mountains of California in the nineteenth century, who in their
last extremity of hunger ate several of the party.

To devour dead relatives, to kill and eat the elders, to feast upon
slaves and captives, even for mothers to eat their children, were
religious and tribal rites for many tens of thousands of years. We
have records of these customs spread over the widest areas of the
world.

Undoubtedly