But I had reckoned without my host. "Pardon me," he said, when I asked him for a lock of his hair, "but I almost believe in it myself." One stout-hearted Fijian servant was ready to step into the breach, but it was then my turn to interfere, for the knowledge that he was bewitched would lay the stoutest-hearted Fijian low in less than a week.[64] A man, delirious with triumph at his narrow escape, once brought me a spell that he had found buried in the thatch of his house in Tawaleka. It was a bamboo six inches long, corked with a tuft of grass. Within was a shred of _masi_, torn, no doubt, from his clothing and a handful of withered leaves of some bush shrub. He wished me to hold inquisition over the countryside in the hope that his enemy would confess the crime, for _ndraunikan_ had been wisely made a punishable offence. Its utility has long passed away, and its power for harm remains. Apart from the death and suffering it may inflict on the victim through terror, it not infrequently leads to actual violence. The murder of Mbuli Mbureta in 1884 is a notable instance. At the trial of his murderers it was elicited that a number of disaffected chiefs in his district had fee'd a wizard to remove him by witchcraft. When weeks had passed, and the unpopular chief continued in obstinate good health, the wizard's employers taunted him with his lack of skill, and received a definite promise of the Mbuli's death before a fixed date. The promise was kept; the victim disappeared, but when his body was discovered it was found that the skull had been fractured by an axe-stroke from behind. In the face of such instances as these it demands some courage to assert that upon the whole the belief in witchcraft was formerly a positive advantage to the community. It filled, in fact, the place of a system of sanitation. The wizard's tools consisting in those waste matters that are inimical to health, every man was his own scavenger. From birth to old age a man was governed by this one fear; he went into the sea, the graveyard or the depths of the forest to satisfy his natural wants; he burned his cast-off _malo_; he gave every fragment left over from his food to the pigs; he concealed even the clippings of his hair in the thatch of his house. This ever-present fear even drove women in the western districts out into the forest for the birth of their children, where fire destroyed every trace of their lying-in. Until Christianity broke it down, the villages were kept clean; there were no festering rubbish-heaps nor filthy _raras_. [Pageheader: SOOTHSAYERS]