This demon was plainly from the grave; yet you will observe he was abroad by day.  And inconsistent as it may seem with the hours of the night watch and the many references to the rising of the morning star, it is no singular exception.  I could never find a case of another who had seen this ghost, diurnal and arboreal in its habits; but others have heard the fall of the tree, which seems the signal of its coming.  Mr. Donat was once pearling on the uninhabited isle of Haraiki.  It was a day without a breath of wind, such as alternate in the archipelago with days of contumelious breezes.  The divers were in the midst of the lagoon upon their employment; the cook, a boy of ten, was over his pots in the camp.  Thus were all souls accounted for except a single native who accompanied Donat into the wood in quest of sea-fowls’ eggs.  In a moment, out of the stillness, came the sound of the fall of a great tree.  Donat would have passed on to find the cause.  ‘No,’ cried his companion, ’that was no tree.  It was something not right.  Let us go back to camp.’  Next Sunday the divers were turned on, all that part of the isle was thoroughly examined, and sure enough no tree had fallen.  A little later Mr. Donat saw one of his divers flee from a similar sound, in similar unaffected panic, on the same isle.  But neither would explain, and it was not till afterwards, when he met with Rua, that he learned the occasion of their terrors.

But whether by day or night, the purpose of the dead in these abhorred activities is still the same.  In Samoa, my informant had no idea of the food of the bush spirits; no such ambiguity would exist in the mind of a Paumotuan.  In that hungry archipelago, living and dead must alike toil for nutriment; and the race having been cannibal in the past, the spirits are so still.  When the living ate the dead, horrified nocturnal imagination drew the shocking inference that the dead might eat the living.  Doubtless they slay men, doubtless even mutilate them, in mere malice.  Marquesan spirits sometimes tear out the eyes of travellers; but even that may be more practical than appears, for the eye is a cannibal dainty.  And certainly the root-idea of the dead, at least in the far eastern islands, is to prowl for food.  It was as a dainty morsel for a meal that the woman denounced Donat at the funeral.  There are spirits besides who prey in particular not on the bodies but on the souls of the dead.  The point is clearly made in a Tahitian story.  A child fell sick, grew swiftly worse, and at last showed signs of death.  The mother hastened to the house of a sorcerer, who lived hard by.  ‘You are yet in time,’ said he; ’a spirit has just run past my door carrying the soul of your child wrapped in the leaf of a purao; but I have a spirit stronger and swifter who will run him down ere he has time to eat it.’  Wrapped in a leaf:  like other things edible and corruptible.