such as are used in dressing a pig for the oven; as much as to say, “Kill us and cook us, if you please.”  Criminals, too, are sometimes bound hand to hand and foot to foot; slung on a pole put through between the hands and feet, carried and laid down before the parties they have injured, like a pig about to be killed and cooked.  So deeply humiliating is this act considered that the culprit who consents to degrade himself so far is almost sure to be forgiven.

From such references to cannibalism as we have at pp. 47, 48, and also the following fragments from old stories, it is further apparent that the custom was not unknown in Samoa.

During a great scarcity occasioned by a gale cannibalism prevailed.  When a light was wanted in the evening, two or three went to fetch it—­it was not safe for one to go alone.  If a child was seen out of doors, some one would entice it by holding up something white and calling the child to get a bit of cocoa-nut kernel, and so kidnap and cook.

A story is also told of a woman who had a child who was playing on the surf on the beach.  Three of her brothers came along and begged her to let them have the child.  She said that if a bloody surf should suddenly appear they might have the child, but not otherwise.  Presently the surf dashed red and bloody on the shore.  She kept to her word, and let the heartless fellows carry off the boy to the oven.

Here is another piece about Ae a Tongan, who attached himself to the Samoan chief Tinilau.  Tinilau travelled from place to place on two turtles.  Ae wished to visit Tonga, and begged from his master the loan of the turtles.  He got them, with the caution to be very careful of them.  As soon as he reached Tonga he called his friends to take on shore the turtles, kill them, and have a feast, and this they gladly did.

Tinilau, after waiting long for the return of the turtles, suspected they had been killed.  This was confirmed in his mind by the appearance on the beach of a bloody wave.  He called a meeting of all the avenging gods of Savaii, and put the case into their hands.  They went off to Tonga, found Ae at midnight in a sound sleep, picked him up, brought him back to Samoa, and laid him down in the front room of the house of Tinilau.

At cock-crowing Ae woke up and said aloud, “Why, you cock! you crow like the one belonging to the pig I lived with.”  Tinilau called out from his room, “Had the fellow you lived with such a fowl?” “Yes, the pig had one just like it.”  “Tell us more about him,” and so Ae went on chattering, and still using the abusive epithet pig when speaking of his master, and talked about the turtles, what a fine feast they had, etc.  As it got lighter, he looked up to the roof and said, “This too is just like the house the pig lived in.”  By-and-by he woke up, as it got light, to the full consciousness that somehow or other he was again in the very house of Tinilau, and that his cannibal master was in the next room.  He was dumb and panic-stricken.  Orders were given to kill him, and he was despatched accordingly, and his body dressed for the oven.  And hence the proverb for any similar action, or if any one takes by mistake or intention what belongs to another, he says in making an apology, “I am like Ae.”