[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]

106 WITH NATIVES IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC

the people of Vao are still confirmed cannibals, only
they have not many opportunities for gratifying their
taste in this direction. Still, not many years ago,
they had killed and eaten an enemy, and each indi-
vidual, even the little children, had received a small
morsel of the body to eat, either with the idea of
destroying the enemy entirely, or as the greatest
insult that could be offered to him.

These same people can be so gay, childlike, kind
and obliging, tactful and generous, that one can hardly
believe the accounts one often hears of sudden out-
breaks of brutal savagery, devilish wickedness, in—
gratitude and falsehood, until one has experienced
them himself. The flattering and confiding child will
turn suddenly and without apparent reason into a
man full of gloom and hatred. All those repressing
influences which lead the dwellers in civilized lands
to some consistency of action are lacking here, and
the morals of the natives run along other lines than
ours. Faith and truth are no virtues, constancy and
perseverance do not exist. The same man who can
torture his wife to death from wanton cruelty, holding
her limbs over the fire till they are charred, etc., will
be inconsolable over the death of a son for a long
time, and will wear a curl, a tooth or a finger—joint
of the dead as a valuable relic round his neck; and
the same man who is capable of preparing a murder
in cold blood for days, may, in some propitious
evening hour, relate the most charming and poetic
fairy-tales. A priest whom I met knew quite a
number of such stories from a man whom he had