they went to prepare the supper, He mingled with the crowd gathered about a dead dog. He listened to their heartless and cruel taunts: "Good enough for it, miserable cur!" "Look at its hangdog face," said another. "Kick it out of sight!" said a third. But God the Saviour, who created all things, quietly said, "Pearls could not equal the whiteness of its teeth!" "He prayeth well who loveth well All things both great and small. "B MAIOLA. EING prayed to death." Among the many superstitions of these most superstitious people, the natives, are many quaint and harmless ones-many, too, like to our own (and, doubtless, learned or caught from the early missionaries and others) foolish and ludicrous; and not a few of their own-Hawaiian-born and bred-that are not only dreadful, but positively terrible, in their significance! It is not for me to say how far or how fast mind. acts and reacts upon mind, when primed and loaded with an eager, greedy desire to destroy, for instance, some hated, hunted and doomed victim! A certain number, a secret conclave, will "pray Maiola to death "--and certain it is that Maiola sometimes dies! Maiola I knew very well, and saw him almost daily for a few years; he was one of the very finest-looking of his race-tall, well-formed, handsome, and strong and healthy, for anything I could see to the contrary. Suddenly he began to fail in strength, and in spirits as well, went to another island for a change-came back again, growing all the while, month after month, weaker, more helpless, and more dispirited-lying all day in his hut doing nothing. When the natives were questioned they would look at one another, glance following glance in quick succession; he was being prayed to death-so they evidently believed! That was simply all, and all there was about it; his people would do what they could, all they could; but medicines, doctors, hospitals were to their minds all "no use." He was "being prayed to death "—and die he must, and die he did! To my mind, he simply took a violent cold, as the natives do -very susceptible to a chill-neglected it, would not go to the hospital ("Queen Emma's Hospital," which is very well managed); asthma followed, quick consumption, dropsy, and the poor fellow paid the last debt! "Maiola is dead." And for one night, and a small part of a day only (in this climate), may we, his relatives, sing our weird, unearthly meles in his praise —telling in odd, plaintive chant his good deeds and noble qualities; send for all his friends and ours to come and mourn and sing and wail with and for us; cry, and laugh, and smoke (passing the pipe around from mouth to mouth), and eat fish and poi; then we will give him Christian burial, cover his grave with leis and blossoms, and come away content that all is well with Maiola. And these superstitions can never be wholly uprooted in any nation or people so long as the world stands, and we are still mortal beings. However lightly it may be ridiculed, yet the attention involuntarily yielded to it whenever it is made the subject of serious discussion, and its preva lence in all ages and countries, even among newly discovered nations that have had no previous interchange of thought with other parts of the world, prove it to be one of those mysterious and instinctive. beliefs, to which, if left to ourselves, we should naturally incline." I may say that I am a total unbeliever in anything of the sort-entirely skeptical on such points. "It's all moonshine"-and yet the very next new moon, if I happen to see it first over my right shoulder, and am "lucky" enough to have even a "wee siller" in my pocket, any one standing by can note the involuntary satisfied smirk on my face. Look at the thousand and one minor superstitions of New England. It is good luck if you fall up-stairs; bad luck to rock an empty chair; for a child to look in a mirror, or to have its nails pared before it is a year old, is certain death; to break a mirror is death to some member of the family; must not pick up a pin if the point is toward you; if the house is in "apple-pie order" no company will come ―vice versa, a crowd; to have the right ear burn, some one is praising you; "an itching palm," money is coming to you. But time would fail me to speak of half that are as common as cows in a pasture. In every Southern State and family superstitions are to be found-mainly of African origin, to be sure -but there they are! Washington Irving tells of the old squaw spirit who had charge of the great treasury of storm and sunshine for the region of the Hudson, as the Indians believed. She dwelt in the highest peak of the Catskill mountains. Here she kept Day and Night shut up in her wigwam, letting out only one of them at a time. She made new moons every month, and hung them up in the sky, cutting up the old ones for stars. The great Manitou, or master spirit, employed her to manufacture clouds. Sometimes she wove them out of cobwebs, gossamers, and morning dew, and sent them off, flake after flake, to float in the air, and give light summer showers. Sometimes she would brew up black thunder-storms, and send down drenching rains to swell the streams and sweep everything away. Have colleges and Christianity been able to do away with the superstitions of "thirteen at a table," or "beginning anything on a Friday"? Nay; what became of the captain who defiantly began the building of his ship on that "unlucky day," finished it on Friday, launched it on Friday, sailed on Friday? These "foolish notions" (?) are not confined to the ignorant entirely, to servants, to negroes and the unenlightened. The argument is not sound-will not prove. "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious." In the book of Job: "In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up: it stood still, but |