silence with, “Ah, Siati, you have forgotten all I did for you;” and off she went.  Siati remembered it all, darted after her crying, and then fell down dead.

Apart from the amusing “suddenness” of the proposal and the marriage, this tale is of interest as indicating that among the lower races woman has—­as many observations indicate—­a greater capacity for conjugal attachment than man.

The courtship scene cited above indicates an instinctive knowledge of the strategic value of coyness and feigned displeasure.  The following story, which I condense from the versified form in which Turner gives it, would seem to be a sort of masculine warning to women against the danger and folly of excessive coyness, so inconvenient to the men: 

Once there were two sisters, Sinaleuuna and Sinaeteva, who wished they had a brother.  Their wish was gratified; a boy was born to their parents, but they brought him up apart, and the sisters never saw him till one day, when he had grown up, he was sent to them with some food.  The girls were struck with his beauty.

Afterwards they sat down and filled into a bamboo bottle the liquid shadow of their brother.  A report had come to them of Sina, a Fijian girl who was so beautiful that all the swells were running after her.  Hearing this, and being anxious to get a wife for their brother, they dressed up and went to Fiji, intending to tell Sina about their brother.  But Sina was haughty; she slighted the sisters and treated them shamefully.  She had heard of the beauty of the young man, whose name was Maluafiti ("Shade of Fiji"), and longed for his coming, but did not know that these were his sisters.

The slighted girls got angry and went to the water when Sina was taking her bath.  From the bottle they threw out on the water the shadow of their brother.  Sina looked at the shadow and was struck with its beauty.  “That is my husband,” she said, “wherever I can find him.”  She called out to the villagers for all the handsome young men to come and find out of whom the figure in the water was the image.  But the shadow was more beautiful than any of these young men and it wheeled round and round in the water whenever Maluafiti, in his own land, turned about.  All this time the sisters were weeping and exclaiming: 

          “Oh, Maluafiti! rise up, it is day;
          Your shadow prolongs our ill-treatment. 
          Maluafiti, come and talk with her face to face,
          Instead of that image in the water.”

Sina had listened, and now she knew it was the shadow of Maluafiti.  “These are his sisters too,” she thought, “and I have been ill-using them; forgive me, I’ve done wrong,” But the ladies were angry still.  Maluafiti came in his canoe to court Lady Sina, and also to fetch his sisters.  When they told him of their treatment he flew into an implacable rage.  Sina longed to get him;