Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/523

 Rh the Duff group). He sailed thither, and was invited by the Crab into its house, where, as before with the Tapakola, he escaped the ambush set for him by pushing open one of the shut doors. Then Lata, seeing the skulls of men devoured by the Crab, painted himself red, white, and black, so much to the Crab's admiration that it desired to know how it could be done. He undertook to produce the same beautiful effect, and persuaded the Crab to mount on the stage over the hearth, and to sit there while he lighted the fire and heaped on wood. The Crab turned red with the heat—the first stage, as Lata assured it, in the beautifying process; then the claws dropped off, and the Crab died. One claw he ate, the other he took home to his mother.

His further adventures, as he sailed about escaping from dangers and deceiving enemies, are very numerous.

.

(Saddle Isle, Banks' Group.)

A party of boys were up in a tree eating the fruit. All went off but two brothers, the elder of whom warned the younger not to throw the kernels on the ground, lest that should happen of which their father had warned them; but he let a fruit drop himself, and immediately appeared under the tree Hole-in-his-Back himself, and begged the boys to throw him down some fruit. At first they were afraid, but after a while threw him down a bunch, which he caught in the hole in his back as in a sack. In this way he received all the fruit on the tree; then he begged them to come down to him, and, with much fear, they consented. He took them to his abode, a cave without an entrance; and, when he came to it, they heard him say: "Close, cave! be open, cave!" The cave opened, and they went in. He bade them stay while he went to get them food, and, as he went out, they heard him say: "Open, cave! be close, cave!" and the mouth of the cave