For example, we find instances of laughter occurring as a recoil from something like timidity or shyness. Two boys, relates a missionary, had had the small-pox and had not seen one another for a month. When they met in the missionary’s house they began by shyly hiding from one another their disfigured faces. At last they summoned courage, and after many side looks at one another they faced round and burst out laughing, the elder boy saying, “We are alike marked”.[163] Here escape from _gêne_, from a feeling akin to shame, was the primary condition of the laughter, though this was no doubt reinforced by a sense of triumph as each discovered that he was, at least, not worse off than the other. A writer tells us that in East Africa {229} “a slave never breaks a thing without an instinctive laugh of pleasure”.[164] This laugh is set down to the love of destruction; yet it may be, in part at least, like that of a naughty child, a laugh of bravado hiding a consciousness of naughtiness, a mode of drowning a nascent sense of shame; for it is presumable, from what this same writer tells us, that an East African slave does not destroy his owner’s property with impunity. At the same time, one must allow that the process of destruction in itself may be to a savage, as alas it often is to an English boy, an easy way to the attainment of a “sudden glory”. Savages appear to resemble children more clearly in their introduction of jocose attack into their play. Here we see an analogy between the mental attitude of a savage and that of an older child. Nothing comes out more plainly in the reports on these uncivilised peoples than their fondness for teasing, including practical jokes. The love of teasing is testified to by more than one writer. A good authority tells us that savages “tease one another much more freely and jokingly (scherzhaft) than Europeans”.[165] This fondness for teasing comes out strongly in their mimicries of one another’s defects, a point to be illustrated presently. In certain cases, the teasing, as with our own boys, is apt to take on a decidedly rough form. A lady, writing of the inhabitants of Funafuti, observes: “It is thought a good practical joke in Funafuti for a girl to saw an unsuspecting youth with a pandanus leaf,” which produces a very painful scratch: “a good deal of laughter on the one side and volubility on the other is the usual result of this joke”.[166] {230} Practical jokes grow out of the teasing instinct: they are new inventions which take the victim by surprise, if they do not distinctly mislead. The savage intelligence is quite boyish in the fecundity of its invention in this domain.