this choosing a victim. As he passed, a close observer might have noted
that each man trembled visibly while the god's eye was upon him, and
looked after him askance with a terrified sidelong gaze as he passed on
to his neighbor. But not one savage gave any overt sign or token of his
terror or his reluctance. On the contrary, as Tu-Kila-Kila passed along
the line with lazy, cruel deliberateness, the men kept chanting aloud
without one tremor in their voices, "We are all your meat. Choose which
one you will take of us."

On a sudden, Tu-Kila-Kila turned sharply round, and, darting a rapid
glance toward a row he had already passed several minutes before, he
exclaimed, with an air of unexpected inspiration, "Tu-Kila-Kila has
chosen. He takes Maloa."

The man upon whose shoulder the god laid his heavy hand as he spoke stood
forth from the crowd without a moment's hesitation. If anger or fear was
in his heart at all, it could not be detected in his voice or his
features. He bowed his head with seeming satisfaction, and answered
humbly, "What Tu-Kila-Kila says must need be done. This is a great honor.
He is a mighty god. We poor men must obey him. We are proud to be taken
up and made one with divinity."

Tu-Kila-Kila raised in his hand a large stone axe of some polished green
material, closely resembling jade, which lay on a block by the door, and
tried its edge with his finger, in an abstracted manner. "Bind him!" he
said, quietly, turning round to his votaries. And the men, each glad to
have escaped his own fate, bound their comrade willingly with green ropes
of plantain fibre.

"Crown him with flowers!" Tu-Kila-Kila said; and a female attendant,