"I wonder how many I can kill before they 'bag' me? I will kill, kill, kill! but--I must have some supper." I soon made a fire, and after a little rummaging found the _matériel_ for a good meal. My cooking was not so bad either, I thought; but certainly hunger is not hard to please in this respect, and I had eaten nothing since the diabolical meal of the preceding evening, and had travelled more than twenty miles. I washed my hands six or seven times, scrubbing away and muttering with an intonation that would have been a fortune to a tragic actor. "Out, damned spot;" and so, after having washed and dried my hands, looked at them, returned, and washed again, again washed, and so on several times, I sat down and demolished two days' allowance. After which, reclining before the fire with my pipe and a blanket over my shoulders, a more kindly feeling towards my fellow men stole gradually upon me. "I wonder," said I to myself, "how long this devilish _tapu_ will last! I wonder if there is to be any end at all to it! I won't run a muck for a week, at all events, till I see what may turn up. Confounded plague though to have to cook!" Having resolved as above, not to take any one's life for a week, I felt more patient. Four days passed somehow or another, and on the morning of the fifth, to my extreme delight, I saw a small canoe, pulled by one man, landing on the beach before the house. He fastened his canoe and advanced towards the kitchen, which was detached from the house, and which, in the late deplorable state of affairs, had become my regular residence. I sat in the doorway, and soon perceived that my visitor was a famous _tohunga_, or priest, and who also had the reputation of being a witch of no ordinary dimensions. He was an old, grave, stolid-looking savage, with one eye, the other had been knocked out long ago in a fight before he turned parson. On he came, with a slow, measured step, slightly gesticulating with one hand, and holding in the other a very small basket, not more than nine or ten inches long. He came on, mumbling and grumbling a perfectly unintelligible _karakia_ or incantation. I guessed at once he was coming to disenchant me, and prepared my mind to submit to any conditions or ceremonial he should think fit to impose. My old friend came gravely up, and putting his hand into the little basket pulled out a baked _kumera_, saying, "_He kai mau_." I of course accepted the offered food, took a bite, and as I ate he mumbled his incantation over me. I remember I felt a curious sensation at the time, like what I fancied a man must feel who had just sold himself, body and bones, to the devil. For a moment I asked myself the question whether I was not actually being then and there handed over to the powers of darkness. The thought startled me. There was I, an unworthy but believing member of the Church of England as by Parliament established, "knuckling down" abjectly to the ministration of a