Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/87

Rh practised in recent times I cannot say. (2) Ownership of land extends also on to the adjoining reef, and all fish caught on that portion of a reef which lies off private property belongs, as a matter of right, to the owner of the soil; Sesere was therefore poaching. Once, when I was dredging between the Murray Islands, we saw turtle-tracks on the beach of an uninhabited island; we landed and dug up the turtle-eggs; when we went to the neighbouring island I had to pay a cripple who lived there for the eggs, or, rather, for those that I and my boatmen had eaten, for the eggs were laid on a sand-beach that belonged to him; the fact that he did not know they were there, or that he could not have got them personally if he had, did not affect the question. (3) I do not know whether this pushing the oracle away in pretended distrust and then appealing to it again was a common practice, but there is a second example of it in the story of the “Six Blind Brothers”; both legends, however, were narrated by the clever story-teller, Malakula of Badu. (4) I certainly understood that Sesere found everything ready-made to hand in the bush, but I may have been mistaken. (5) A figure of a dugong-platform or neĕt, and an account of the way in which the dugong is caught, will be found in my paper in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute. The earth-oven is a hole in the ground in which hot stones and leaves are placed along with the meat, the whole being covered with earth. (7) This is a cylindrical armlet of woven split rattan, which is worn on the left fore-arm to prevent abrasion of the skin in the recoil of the bow-string when shooting. (8) There is no evidence that these men were even wounded; a similar instance of the bearer of bad news falling down dead when he had told his tale occurs in the legend of Kwoiam.