little drunk, but, on making inquiries of those persons who best knew the natives, we learned that any native who, without permission, kills wild animals upon land belonging to a tribe of which he is not a member, incurs the penalty of death. The feelings of the natives are very strong with respect to ownership in the soil, and some of them will still point to certain spots as theirs which have long been cleared and occupied by Englishmen.
The first colonists who took possession of the country were supposed by the poor savages to be the souls of their dead compatriots, who had returned with white faces. In some of the new-comers such strong personal resemblance to deceased native individuals was thought to be detected, that the surviving relations gave the strangers the names of the departed, and would even assert that upon their bodies would still be found the mark of the spear wounds which had caused the deaths of their prototypes. As these ideas still prevailed to a certain extent, my husband came in for his share of metempsychosis, and was known amongst the older natives by the name of an aboriginal gentleman who had been speared in the back at some bygone battle.
But to return to the early days of the colony: when the supposed ghosts began to make a fresh distribution of the land, regardless of the real owners' lien upon it, and to infringe their game laws, the original proprietors became "very troublesome," as the phrase goes for native behaviour under such circumstances. They continued to oppose the appropriation of the land until cowed into submission, and seemed disposed to treat the invaders with as little hospitality as our own ancestors showed towards Julius
