In war, all assembled to be sprinkled with Nafanua’s cocoa-nut water before going to battle.  If well done, they conquered; if not, they were driven before the enemy.  Confession of offences sometimes preceded the sprinkling, as it was a sign of pardon and purification.  Occasional torchlight processions through the village were held in honour of Nafanua.  Cases of sickness were also brought and laid before the priest.  Those who took fine mats were cured, but shabby offerings of native cloth only prolonged the disease.

17.  NAVE.

Nave was the name of a village god on the island of Tutuila.  It was represented by a stone called Maa o Nave, or the stone of Nave.  This was abbreviated and euphonised into Amanave, and is the name of the village to this day.

18.  NONIA.

This was the name of a village god, and was supposed to be incarnate in the cockle.  If this shell-fish was eaten by any one of the place a cockle would grow on his nose.  If one was picked up and taken away from the shore, a cockle would appear on some part of that person’s body.

May was the usual month for feasting and prayers to Nonia, for the removal of coughs and other ailments usually prevalent during that time of transition from the wet to the dry months.  On the days of worship the people went about with bundles of cockles, and through them prayed to Nonia.

19.  O LE NIFO LOA—­The long tooth.

This was the name of a disease-making god, said to have come from Fiji and taken up his abode about the south side of Savaii.  People, canoes, or property of any kind belonging to that place, were supposed to be media by which the long tooth might be conveyed and cause disease and death.  One day the tooth was visible to an old lady, and struck by some scalding greens which she threw at it, and ever after it was crooked and not so deadly.  If a person recovered it was said that the tooth must have had the crook running outside of the wound, and vice versa in a case of death.

To this day the long tooth superstition is a nuisance.  A few years ago some people went to that part of Savaii to buy a canoe.  They did not get it, but, from a number of deaths soon after at their village, they believed that the tooth had followed them.  After a battle ten years ago a man from the long tooth district in Savaii who had been killed, was buried in a village in Upolu.  After a time a young chief died there rather suddenly.  The tooth was suspected by some of the old people, and so they dug up the bones of the man who had died in battle four years before, and threw them away into the sea, far off outside the reef, so as to rid the land, as they supposed, from the long tooth enemy.  Like the celebrated tooth of Buddha at Ceylon, visited by the Prince of Wales in 1875, about which kings fought, the attempt to burn which burst the furnace, and, although buried deep in the earth and trodden down by elephants, managed to come up again, so the long tooth god of Samoa continues to come up every now and then after a sudden death or a prolonged disease of the knee joint, or other deadly ailment.