But the dead are not exclusive in their diet.  They carry with them to the grave, in particular, the Polynesian taste for fish, and enter at times with the living into a partnership in fishery.  Rua-a-mariterangi is again my authority; I feel it diminishes the credit of the fact, but how it builds up the image of this inveterate ghost-seer!  He belongs to the miserably poor island of Taenga, yet his father’s house was always well supplied.  As Rua grew up he was called at last to go a-fishing with this fortunate parent.  They rowed the lagoon at dusk, to an unlikely place, and the lay down in the stern, and the father began vainly to cast his line over the bows.  It is to be supposed that Rua slept; and when he awoke there was the figure of another beside his father, and his father was pulling in the fish hand over hand.  ’Who is that man, father?’ Rua asked.  ‘It is none of your business,’ said the father; and Rua supposed the stranger had swum off to them from shore.  Night after night they fared into the lagoon, often to the most unlikely places; night after night the stranger would suddenly be seen on board, and as suddenly be missed; and morning after morning the canoe returned laden with fish.  ’My father is a very lucky man,’ thought Rua.  At last, one fine day, there came first one boat party and then another, who must be entertained; father and son put off later than usual into the lagoon; and before the canoe was landed it was four o’clock, and the morning star was close on the horizon.  Then the stranger appeared seized with some distress; turned about, showing for the first time his face, which was that of one long dead, with shining eyes; stared into the east, set the tips of his fingers to his mouth like one a-cold, uttered a strange, shuddering sound between a whistle and a moan—­a thing to freeze the blood; and, the day-star just rising from the sea, he suddenly was not.  Then Rua understood why his father prospered, why his fishes rotted early in the day, and why some were always carried to the cemetery and laid upon the graves.  My informant is a man not certainly averse to superstition, but he keeps his head, and takes a certain superior interest, which I may be allowed to call scientific.  The last point reminding him of some parallel practice in Tahiti, he asked Rua if the fish were left, or carried home again after a formal dedication.  It appears old Mariterangi practised both methods; sometimes treating his shadowy partner to a mere oblation, sometimes honestly leaving his fish to rot upon the grave.

It is plain we have in Europe stories of a similar complexion; and the Polynesian varua ino or aitu o le vao is clearly the near kinsman of the Transylvanian vampire.  Here is a tale in which the kinship appears broadly marked.  On the atoll of Penrhyn, then still partly savage, a certain chief was long the salutary terror of the natives.  He died, he was buried; and his late neighbours had scarce