invited to attend.' The faithful sit about the room--according to
one informant, singing hymns; according to another, now singing and
now whistling; the leader, the wizard--let me rather say, the
medium--sits in the midst, enveloped in a sheet and silent; and
presently, from just above his head, or sometimes from the midst of
the roof, an aerial whistling proceeds, appalling to the
inexperienced. This, it appears, is the language of the dead; its
purport is taken down progressively by one of the experts, writing,
I was told, 'as fast as a telegraph operator'; and the
communications are at last made public. They are of the baldest
triviality; a schooner is, perhaps, announced, some idle gossip
reported of a neighbour, or if the spirit shall have been called to
consultation on a case of sickness, a remedy may be suggested. One
of these, immersion in scalding water, not long ago proved fatal to
the patient. The whole business is very dreary, very silly, and
very European; it has none of the picturesque qualities of similar
conjurations in New Zealand; it seems to possess no kernel of
possible sense, like some that I shall describe among the Gilbert
islanders. Yet I was told that many hardy, intelligent natives
were inveterate Whistlers. 'Like Mahinui?' I asked, willing to
have a standard; and I was told 'Yes.' Why should I wonder? Men
more enlightened than my convict-catechist sit down at home to
follies equally sterile and dull.

The medium is sometimes female. It was a woman, for instance, who
introduced these practices on the north coast of Taiarapu, to the
scandal of her own connections, her brother-in-law in particular
declaring she was drunk. But what shocked Tahiti might seem fit
enough in the Paumotus, the more so as certain women there possess,
by the gift of nature, singular and useful powers. They say they