Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/171

Rh Then said Sinasengi: "Bother it! what is the matter with the birds? There are two kinds of birds in my country, the tarn and the heron." The woman went down to visit the birds. She looked; the man was not ; he was burnt continually by the action of the sun at sea, there was no body to the man, he was [like] the skin of a paonga fruit. Then the woman Sinasengi fainted as if dead. She revived again, and she [said]: "Stop a bit till I startle him. If he is not startled he is a god; if he is startled he is a man. Catch you!" The man was startled, and said: "O lady, I was startled." Sinasengi said: "O chief, you debase yourself on the beach, and leave good mats and good houses and good cloth, and you debase yourself on this bad place." Tingilau said: "Isu e, sina sungalu, floating about I came and drew up my canoe in this place."

They went up into the house. The woman went and cooked an oven of food. She baked taro (Arum esculentum) unscraped, and scraped taro; she roasted a fowl unplucked, and a plucked fowl; she baked a pig unsinged and a pig singed. She opened the oven, and she laid out the fowl that was broiled with its feathers, and the taro that was baked with the skin. Tingilau called out and said: "Lady, things are not done like this to visitors in our country." Sinasengi then called aloud: "I abominate the people who have brought the wrong things to the chief" She went and took down the singed pig and the scraped taro. The man ate.

The man married the woman and she had a child. After some days he walked around and mourned because he thought of his wife Sina. Sinasengi thought about Tingilau wandering about, and she went to her Punga-