in common probably with all other peoples of Aryan race, regarded all their domestic comforts as derived by them from their ancestors in the forgotten past, that is to say, from the departed. They seem, therefore, to have reasoned that there must be a land of untold wealth and bliss somewhere in the nether world inhabited by their dead ancestors; and the further inference would be that the things which they most valued themselves in life had been procured from the rulers of that nether world through force or fraud by some great benefactor of the human race; for it seldom seems to have entered their thoughts that the powers below would give up anything for nothing. This is illustrated over and over again in the fairy tales of the Celts, when they represent persons who have lived on the most friendly terms with the fairies, trying, when returning to their friends in this world, to smuggle into it some of the wealth of the country visited by them under-ground: they always fail in their object, and only succeed in rousing the indignation of the fairies. The same thing might be illustrated from the beliefs of other nations at considerable length; but I will only adduce as instance a Maori tale, which represents a woman who visited her dead relatives trying to bring back with her some sweet potatoes, a most important article of food to the aborigines of New Zealand. The story is told by Dr. Tylor,[1] to the effect that the narrator of it had a servant named Te Wharewera, who related to him that "an aunt of this man [Te Wharewera] died in a solitary hut near the banks of Lake Rotorua. Being a lady of rank she was left in her hut, the door
- ↑ In his Primitive Culture, ij. 50-2, from the seconded, of Shortland's Traditions of New Zealand]], p. 150.
