Let us first take a glance at the hilarious appreciation of the _other_ tribe’s ways. The spectacle of the foreigner will grow particularly entertaining when he seems to bungle in doing something which is perfectly familiar to the observer’s own tribe. The Tahitians, it seems, are laughed at by the dwellers in the neighbouring islands when they try to kill a turtle by pinching its throat. As may be supposed, the trick, so useful to the beast, of drawing in the head gives a veritable look of the absurd to these attempts. So, too, the enlightened people of one island drew voluminous amusement from the news that those of another island who had just come into possession of the novelty, a pair of scissors, tried to sharpen them by baking them.[184] These two illustrations show a dim apprehension of the fitness of things as {238} determined, not by the relative standard of “my way,” but by an objective standard. The field in which they cull most of their facetious enjoyment of the doings of outsiders would seem to be the ways of their white visitors. There the differences, the departure from “our way” and the inability to acquire this are great enough to appeal strongly to their crude sense of the ludicrous. They see the odd white people do a number of things which strike them as extraordinary and quite useless. If the Englishman laughs at the foreigner for not taking his morning tub, the simple savage will turn the tables by making merry over our elaborate washings. Thus the Fuegians, though living much in the water, have no idea of washing themselves; accordingly “when Europeans first came among them, the sight of a man washing his face seemed to them so irresistibly ludicrous that they burst into shrieks of laughter”.[185] Here is an example of a rather more complex feeling in presence of new-fangled European ways. It seems that a South African Prince, presumably as a compliment to the white man’s custom, wished to shave himself and, as our youths frequently do on first attempting the feat, cut himself. He then asked his European visitor to perform the office for him. The natives present “stood mute with admiration during the whole performance, gazing with the utmost eagerness in their countenances, and bursting at length into a general peal of laughter—this being their customary mode of expressing delight, astonishment, nay even embarrassment and fear.”[186] The last part of this statement is a little loose, since, as we have seen, it is not so much the astonishment, the embarrassment, or the fear in itself, which laughter expresses, as a relaxation of the strain involved in these attitudes. {239}