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Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before by George Turner
page 41 of 222 (18%)
tooth must have had the crook running _outside_ of the wound, and
_vice versa_ in a case of death.

To this day the long tooth superstition is a nuisance. A few years ago
some people went to that part of Savaii to buy a canoe. They did not
get it, but, from a number of deaths soon after at their village, they
believed that the tooth had followed them. After a battle ten years
ago a man from the long tooth district in Savaii who had been killed,
was buried in a village in Upolu. After a time a young chief died
there rather suddenly. The tooth was suspected by some of the old
people, and so they dug up the bones of the man who had died in battle
four years before, and threw them away into the sea, far off outside
the reef, so as to rid the land, as they supposed, from the long tooth
enemy. Like the celebrated tooth of Buddha at Ceylon, visited by the
Prince of Wales in 1875, about which kings fought, the attempt to burn
which burst the furnace, and, although buried deep in the earth and
trodden down by elephants, managed to come up again, so the long tooth
god of Samoa continues to come up every now and then after a sudden
death or a prolonged disease of the knee joint, or other deadly
ailment.


20. PAVA.

This was the name of a war god on the south side of Upolu. It was
originally the name of a man who came from the east end of the group.
He and his wife went to work as usual in the bush, and left their
children in the house. The children kindled a fire to cook some food.
Tangaloa, seeing the smoke, came down from the heavens. He found only
the children, and inquired where their parents were. Gone to work,
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