Extravagance in funerary rites, often ruinous to the family, may sometimes be checked by considerations of economy or convenience. Thus some tribes of South Australia may burn all the property of the deceased except their stone axes, which are too valuable to be lost to the survivors. The Nagas bury with the body the things most closely associated with the dead; but things of small value, never the gun or the cornelian necklace.[253] The Todas, who burn their dead, lay the body on a bier with many valuable offerings and swing it three times over the fire; they then remove the money and the more valuable ornaments and burn the rest with the corpse. They say that the dead still have the use of everything that was swung over the fire; and tell a story to explain the ceremony; but Dr. Rivers observes that “this symbolic burning has the great advantage that the objects of value are not consumed, and are available for use another time.”[254] The Araucanians buried many things with the dead, and at the grave of a chief slew a horse. But for all valuables—silver spurs and bits and steel lance-heads—they left wooden substitutes. As for the horse, the mourners ate it, and the ghost got nothing but the skin and the soul of it.[255] Economy may also induce the belief that ghosts are easily deceived, or are unaccountably stupid in some special way: as in the widespread practice of carrying a corpse out of its house through a hole in the wall; trusting that, the hole having been immediately repaired, the ghost can never find his way back; so soon does he forget the familiar door. This is cheaper than to burn the house down. Superstitious practices may be carried out with self-destructive infatuation, or restricted at will: in Florida (Melanesia), in a certain stream, a very large eel was taken for a ghost; no one might bathe in, or drink at, the stream—“except at one pool, which for convenience was considered not to be sacred.”[256] A conflicting desire creates a limiting belief. Whilst often the most painful or disgusting rites are endured for fear of ghosts, at other times they are assumed to be so dull that we are tempted to say: “Whatever is convenient is credible.”