the field of battle. Now these reports have certainly
significance; it is not hard to trace them to political grumblers
or to read in them a threat of coming trouble; from that merely
human side I found them ominous myself. But it was the spiritual
side of their significance that was discussed in secret council by
my rulers. I shall best depict this mingled habit of the
Polynesian mind by two connected instances. I once lived in a
village, the name of which I do not mean to tell. The chief and
his sister were persons perfectly intelligent: gentlefolk, apt of
speech. The sister was very religious, a great church-goer, one
that used to reprove me if I stayed away; I found afterwards that
she privately worshipped a shark. The chief himself was somewhat
of a freethinker; at the least, a latitudinarian: he was a man,
besides, filled with European knowledge and accomplishments; of an
impassive, ironical habit; and I should as soon have expected
superstition in Mr. Herbert Spencer. Hear the sequel. I had
discovered by unmistakable signs that they buried too shallow in
the village graveyard, and I took my friend, as the responsible
authority, to task. 'There is something wrong about your
graveyard,' said I, 'which you must attend to, or it may have very
bad results.' 'Something wrong? What is it?' he asked, with an
emotion that surprised me. 'If you care to go along there any
evening about nine o'clock you can see for yourself,' said I. He
stepped backward. 'A ghost!' he cried.

In short, in the whole field of the South Seas, there is not one to
blame another. Half blood and whole, pious and debauched,
intelligent and dull, all men believe in ghosts, all men combine
with their recent Christianity fear of and a lingering faith in the
old island deities. So, in Europe, the gods of Olympus slowly