University of Virginia Library

A GLIMPSE OF THE HEATHEN AGES

About half past eight o'clock a dozen native women rose up and began the sad mourning rites. They locked arms and swayed violently backward and forward; faced around and went through a number of quick gestures with hands, heads, and bodies; turned and twisted and mingled together—heads and hands going all the time, and their motions timed to a weird howling which it would be rather complimentary to call singing; and finished up spreading their arms abroad and throwing their heads and bodies far backward simultaneously, and all uttering a deafening squall at the same moment.

"Well, if there's anything between the Farallones and Fiddler's Green as devilish as that, I wish I may—"

"Brown," I said, "these solemn and impressive funeral rites of the ancient times have been rescued from the oblivion to which the ignorant missionaries consigned them forty years ago, by the good and wise Lord Bishop Staley, and it ill beseems such as you to speak irreverently of them. I cannot permit you to say more in this vein in my presence."

When the women had finished, the multitude clapped their hands boisterously in token of applause.

A number of native boys next stood up and went through a performance a good deal like that which I have just described, singing at the same time a strange, unmusical chant. The audience applauded again. (Harris came out once more on that part of the veranda which could be seen best by the great assemblage, and assumed an attitude and expression so suggestive of his being burdened with the cares of state of sixty or seventy kingdoms, that, if I had been a stranger, I must have said to myself "The trifles Richelieu had to contend with were foolishness to what this man has got on his hands.")