selves, with songs. While the young men and women were undergoing the painful and protracted operation of tattooing, the females sang a suitable song of encouragement and hope. The females, also, courted and covertly indicated their tender feelings in songs; the disconsolate lover sought to assuage his melancholy with songs;* “I think,” observes Burns, “it is one of the greatest pleasures attending a poetic genius, that we can give our woes, cares, joys, and loves, an embodied form in verse, which, to me, is ever immediate ease.” It is said of Fuseli, the painter, that seeing his wife in a passion one day, he said, “Swear, my love, swear heartily; you know not how much it will ease you! and not unfrequently the suicide (especially when a female, and about to throw herself from a precipice) sang her last words, like a dying swan,—or after the example of Sappho—in a song! Their handsome forest pet, the tuii, or parson-bird, (Prosthemadera novœ-zealandiœ), was taught with much pains a very long song, though they might have more easily taught him to whistle.† Vocal whistling, however, was almost wholly unknown, and never practised, being quite foreign to the natural musical genius of this people; indeed they often showed a dislike to it when made by a European (as I have proved). Probably this aversion to vocal whistling was owing to their superstitious views, as (they said) their familiar spirits or demons (atuas) thus made their presence known. Yet they had a peculiar kind of loud whistle in use by their chiefs, made out of hollowed hardwood, though not very common, when Cook visited them. Children sang or trolled songs in summer to lessen the power of the sun's rays, also to cause the rain to cease, and to lull the fierce winds, etc. The chiefs sang suitable songs to their pretty paper kites while flying them, and the young women did the same to their light stuffed and ornamented hand-ball while engaged at their pleasing and dexterous game of poi; the women also extemporized their joyous songs over a plentiful haul of fish, or an abundant snaring of birds, and, also, had their semi-humorous songs for their big gourds or pumpkins, in cutting or breaking them up for cooking. The old Maoris even professed to have heard songs, of a highly curious character, sung by the spirits of the dead! and by fancied atuas, supernatural beings, while engaged in fishing far out at sea.‡ There is a singularity here which has frequently reminded me of what is recorded of the Greenlanders, who, however, did not meet their supernatural visitants so bravely as the Maoris. It is said “that their times were often made painful by fancied terrors; sad sounds were often abroad in the air, and there were noises also on the deep and the shore, for which they could not account. In the sublime description in the Apocrypha, they heard the sound of fearful things rushing by, but saw not the form thereof.”’ And again, “Of spectres they stand greatly in dread. The loneliness of their lives, where the sense of hearing is often invaded with the most appalling sounds, conduces to this belief. The spirits of the lost at sea are heard to come on shore in the dead of night, and utter a mournful wailing.” A singular effect of the imagination is also given:—“A Greenlander came from a distant and quite healthy place to visit his sister in the Mission Station; they were deeply attached to each other. Before the boat came to land, he thought he saw her apparition flitting along the shore and beckoning him to come. The Greenlander paused on his oar, and gazed intently on the spot; his companions saw nothing but the rocks and the ice-hills. But there, he said, she was standing, like the dead, and he refused to go near her. They rowed back directly. Overcome with the fright, he fell sick the very day of his return, and infected the people where he dwelt.”—Life of Hans Egede. These latter they responded to and sang their replies.