to enquire about her. He was instructed to give himself the appropriate smell with the liquor of a putrid black gecko, and was given a stick. The two then descended, and reached Panoi; the ghosts detected the living man, and cried out, 'The smell of that world!' The two declared that they were really dead, and to try them the ghosts brought out dead men's bones, to see if they would rattle them as ghosts do, by one, by two, by three; they did this rightly and were allowed to go on. Vanvanvegirgir went forward to find the man's wife, and brought her to him; they talked together, and the man begged her to go back to the world with him. That she said was impossible, and she gave him a shell armlet by which to remember her. He took her by the hand and began to drag her; her hand came off, and her body came to pieces. For, as the story is explained, ghosts in Panoi have something more of body and substance than they have when they come back into the world; else the man could not have taken hold of his dead wife's hand. When a ghost comes into the world, it is but a taqangiu that is seen, a something circumscribed by an outline like a shadow; but the ghost in Panoi, of which the other is probably again the ghost, has a tarapei, a body, which has not only form and colour, but a certain consistency. There is still living in Vanua Lava a woman who turned her descent to Panoi to a useful purpose. Her husband, a Gaua man, died, and she herself was very ill and appeared to die. She recovered, however, and told the people that she had followed her husband to the hill Garat, and had seen him there bound hand and foot. The ghosts told her, she declared, that this was done because he had not paid his debts; 'Go back,' they bade her, 'to the Gaua people, and say to them, Pay your debts, don't kill one another; this is how we shall treat such men.'
The manner of burial in Ma wo, Aurora, in the New Hebrides, and the belief of the people there concerning the dead, is fully described in an account written by a native, of which what follows is generally a translation. In the first
