he passing of spirits thither through the air.
After a great battle they are thus warned of the event long before
the news can arrive by natural means.2 It is a common superstition
with them that the left eye of every chief, after his death,
becomes a star. The Pleiades are seven New Zealand chiefs,
brothers, who were slain together in battle and are now fixed in
the sky, one eye of each, in the shape of a star, being the only
part of them that is visible. It has been observed that the
mythological doctrine of the glittering host of heaven being an
assemblage of the departed heroes of earth never received a more
ingenious version.3 Certainly it is a magnificent piece of insular
egotism. It is noticeable here that, in the Norse mythology, Thor,
having slain Thiasse, the giant genius of winter, throws his eyes
up to heaven, and they become stars. Shungie, a celebrated New
Zealand king, said he had on one occasion eaten the left eye of a
great chief whom he had killed in battle, for the purpose of thus
increasing the glory of his own eye when it should be transferred
to the firmament. Sometimes, apparently, it was thought that there
was a separate immortality for each of the eyes of the dead, the
left ascending to heaven as a star, the right, in the form of a
spirit, taking flight for Reinga.

The custom, common in Africa and in New Zealand, of slaying the
slaves or the wives of an important person at his death and
burying them with him, prevails also among the inhabitants of the
Feejee Islands. A chief's wives are sometimes strangled on these
occasions, sometimes buried alive. One cried to her brother, "I
wish to die, that I may accompany my husband to the land where he
has gone. Love me, and make haste to strangle me, that I may
overtake him."4 Departing souls go to the tribunal of Ndengei, who
either receives them into bliss, or sends them back, as ghosts, to
haunt the scenes of their former existence, or distributes them as
food to devils, or imprisons them for a period and then dooms them
to annihilation. The Feejees are also very much afraid of Samiulo,
ruler of a subterranean world, who sits at the brink of a huge
fiery cavern, into which he hurls the souls he dislikes. In the
road to Ndengei stands an enormous giant, armed with an axe, who
tries to maim and murder the passing souls. A powerful chief,
whose gun was interred with him, loaded it, and, when

2 Shortland, Traditions of the New Zealanders, ch. vii.