Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/372

64 but it sometimes happens that this knowledge which he presupposes is wanting, because he is speaking to a generation or a people that does not possess his experience. Then misunderstandings arise, as constantly happens when Europeans attempt to explain to savages things of which they have not the remotest conception; the same happens when savages tell things to Europeans who are not sufficiently acquainted with their customs.

I will give an instance from my own experience; for I very nearly became, quite unwittingly, the author of a miraculous legend, not by giving a free rein to my fancy, but on the contrary, while I was conscientiously trying to record as accurately as possible the manners and customs of Eddystone Island in the Solomons. I was noting down the legend of the Flying Chief who was killed by the people of Pou and Lape, because he had concealed from them a new type of fish hook with which he caught ten or twenty bonitoes to their one. His own people carried his body inland to bury him. Arrived at a certain spot they asked, "Will this do?" "No," he answered, "the Pou and Lape killed me, and they are not far." They carried him to Inusa: "Let us leave him here," they said, but he objected because Pou and Lape were in sight. At last they found a spot where Pou and Lape were out of sight, and then he assented.

Now I will wager that most of my readers in hearing the narrative have understood that the dead man raised his voice and uttered the words ascribed to him. That is exactly what I understood at first, and would have continued to imagine if I had been interested only in stories and never troubled about the customs. I should then have come home and propagated my error; possibly the legend might have been quoted by other students as an instance of the dead speaking. Fortunately, I had pursued my researches sufficiently far to discover my error; it occurred to me that the natives constantly conversed with ghosts