might, without the use of hands; and at night, tightening his greasy rags around him, he would crawl into some miserable lair of leaves and rubbish, there, cold, half-starved, miserable, and dirty, to pass, in fitful ghost-haunted slumbers, a wretched night, as prelude to another wretched day. It requires, they say, all sorts of people to make a world; and I have often thought, in observing one of these miserable objects, that his or her's was the very lowest ebb to which a human being's prospects in life could be brought by adverse fate. When I met, or rather saw, a female practitioner, I fairly ran for it; and so, believing my readers to be equally tender-hearted, I shall not venture on any more description, but merely say that the man undertaker, such as I have described him, would be taken for Apollo if seen in one of these hag's company. What will my kind reader say when I tell him that I myself once got _tapu'd_ with this same horrible, horrible, most horrible style of _tapu_? I hold it to be a fact that there is not one man in New Zealand but myself who has a clear understanding of what the word "excommunication" means, and I did not understand what it meant till I got _tapu'd_. I was returning with about sixty men from a journey along the west coast. I was a short distance in advance of the party, when I came to where the side of a hill had fallen down on to the beach, and exposed a number of human bones. There was a large skull rolling about in the water. I took up this skull without consideration, carried it to the side of the hill, scraped a hole, and covered it up. Just as I had finished covering it up, up came my friends, and I saw at once, by the astonishment and dismay depicted on their countenances, that I had committed some most unfortunate act. They soon let me know that the hill had been a burying-place of their tribe, and jumped at once to the conclusion that the skull was the skull of one of their most famous chiefs, whose name they told me, informing me also that I was no longer fit company for human beings, and begging me to fall to the rear and keep my distance. They told me all this from a very respectful distance, and if I made a step towards them, they all ran as if I had been infected by the plague. This was an awkward state of things, but as it could not be helped, I voted myself _tapu_, and kept clear of my friends till night. At night when they camped I was obliged to take my solitary abode at a distance, under shelter of a rock. When the evening meal was cooked, they brought me a fair allowance, and set it down at a respectful distance from where I sat, fully expecting, I suppose, that I should bob at it as Maori _kai tango atua_ or undertakers are wont to do. I had, however, no idea of any such proceeding; and pulling out my knife proceeded to operate in the usual manner. I was checked by an exclamation of horror and surprise from the whole band, "Oh, what are