"I walked into a number of temples, which were very
plentiful, and at last into a bure theravou (young
man's bure),
where I saw a tall young man about twenty years old. He
appeared to be somewhat ailing, but not at all emaciated.
He was rolling up the mat he had been sleeping upon,
evidently preparing to go away somewhere. I addressed
him, and asked him where he was going, when he
immediately answered that he was going to be buried. I
observed that he was not dead yet, but he said he soon
should be dead when he was put under ground. I
asked him why he was going to be buried? He said it was
three days since he had eaten anything, and consequently
he was getting very thin; and that if he lived any longer
he would be much thinner, and then the women would call
him a lila (skeleton), and laugh at him. I said he was
a fool to throw himself away for fear of being laughed at;
and asked him what or who his private god was, knowing it
to be no use talking to him about Providence, a thing he
had never heard of. He said his god was a shark, and that
if he were cast away in a canoe and was obliged to swim,
the sharks would not bite him. I asked him if he believed
the shark, his god, had any power to act over him? He
said yes. 'Well then,' said I, 'why do you not live a little
longer, and trust to your god to give you an appetite?'
Finding that he could not give me satisfactory answers, and
being determined to get buried to avoid the jeers of the
ladies, which to a Feejeean are intolerable, he told me I
knew nothing about it, and that I must not compare him to
a white man, who was generally insensible to all shame, and
did not care how much he was laughed at. I called him a
fool, and said the best thing he could do was to get buried
out of the way, because I knew that most of them work by
the rules of contrary; but it was all to no purpose. By
this time all his relations had collected round the door.
His father had a kind of wooden spade to dig the grave
with, his mother a new suit of tapa [bark-cloth], his sister
some vermilion and a whale's tooth, as an introduction to
the great god of Rage-Rage. He arose, took up his bed
and walked, not for life, but for death, his father, mother,
and sister following after, with several other distant relations,

-420-