Take, for example, the very praiseworthy idea that the life of a chief is most important to his people, and that his person is therefore considered as tapu. This is a proper and wholesome idea, and is conducive to the interests of law and justice. But the development of the system becomes a tyranny. The chief himself being tapu, everything that he touched, even with the skirt of his garment, became tapu, and thenceforth belonged to him. So ingrained is this idea that on one occasion, when a great chief was wearing a large and handsome mantle and found it too heavy for a hot day, he threw it down a precipice. His companion remonstrated with him, saying that it would have been better to have hung the mat on a bough, so that the next comer might make use of it. The chief was horror-struck at such an idea. It was hardly possible that a superior to himself should find the mat, and not likely that an equal should do so, and if an inferior were to wear it, he would at once die. As the very contact of a chiefs garment renders an object tapu, _à fortiori_ does his blood, and one drop of the blood of a chief falling upon even such objects as are free from the ordinary laws of tapu renders them his property. A curious example of the operation of this law occurred when a meeting of chiefs was called at the Taupo lake. As the principal man of the tribes, the celebrated chief Te Heu-heu was invited, and a new and beautifully carved canoe sent to fetch him. As he stepped into it, a splinter ran into his foot, inflicting a very slight wound. Every man leaped out of the canoe, which was at once drawn up on the beach and considered as the property of Te Heu-heu. Another canoe was procured, and in it the party proceeded on their journey. Another kind of tapu takes place with regard to any object which is connected with the death of a native. If, for example, a Maori has fallen overboard from a canoe and been drowned, the vessel can never be used again, but is tapu. Or if a man commits suicide by shooting himself, as has already been mentioned, the musket is tapu. But in these cases the articles are tapu to the atuas, and not to men. Sometimes they are left to decay on the spot, no man daring to touch them, or they are broken to pieces, and the fragments stuck upright in the earth to mark the spot where the event occurred. Sometimes this personal tapu becomes exceedingly inconvenient. The wife of an old and venerable tohunga had been ill, and was made tapu for a certain length of time, during which everything that she touched became tapu. Even the very ground on which she sat was subject to this law, and accordingly, whenever she rose from the ground, the spot on which she had sat was surrounded with a fence of small boughs stuck archwise into the earth, in order to prevent profane feet from polluting the sacred spot.