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208 into a house decorated with cocoa-nut fronds, and they saw no more; but they knew that he drank the kava he had prepared, and then lay down till his soul went out of him in the form of a bird and followed the ship. After a while he emerged from the house, and told the people that all who had been carried away were well but one, who was dead. Long afterwards, when some of those who were then on board returned, they said that he had brought back the truth, one of them by that time had died.

(4) Dreams. The native belief as to the nature of dreams, and as to the part played by the soul of men in dreams, is a subject of enquiry which belongs rather to the general question as to the conceptions the people have of the nature of the soul itself and of human life; but the use of dreaming as a branch of the practice of magic comes appropriately into view in this place. In Maewo, Aurora, in the New Hebrides, the dreaming-man, tatua qoreqore, who may be also in other ways a gismana in his use of supernatural power, is in request in cases of sickness. In an ordinary case, when it is supposed that a ghost is the cause of the complaint, the friends of the sick man send for the professional dreamer and give him now tobacco, as formerly they gave mats, to find out what ghost has been offended, and to make it up with him. He sleeps, and in his dream goes to the place where the sick man has been working; there he meets some one, like an old man it is likely, of small size, who really is a ghost, and he learns from him what is his name. The ghost tells him that the sick man as he was working has encroached upon his ground, the place he haunts as his own, and that to punish him he has taken away his soul and impounded it in a magic fence in the garden. The dreamer begs for the return of the soul, and asks pardon on behalf of the sick man, who meant no disrespect; the ghost pulls up the fence in which the soul is enclosed, and lets it out; the man of course recovers. These dreamers are able also to visit Malanga, an abode of the dead. Sometimes if a child is sick it is supposed that there is some one in Malanga drawing away its soul. The conjecture is that the soul of the infant is