312 TlMEHRI. 
" The husband, pleased that a man or woman is born into the world, 
and himself the honoured cause, reclines complacently in his hammock, 
and receives the compliments and congratulations of visitors. Nor 
does he leave the house until after the expiration of a certain time ; 
for well he knows (if belief is certain knowledge) that the simple 
spirit of the newly born infant recognizes in him paternity and head- 
ship of the house. The infant spirit then clings to the father, gazes 
upon him, follows him wherever he goes, and for a time is as intimate 
and familiar with the father as he is with his own infant body, with 
which the infant spirit is only recently associated. 
One would, perhaps, have thought that the mother should claim the 
most intimate relationship ; but it appears that a priority of affinity 
is established with the father, as progenitor of the infant spirit. 
How then can the father resign his recumbent position in the ham- 
mock, or his careful and limited walk within the precints of the 
dwelling, and go out to the forest or field, to use an axe or cutlass, 
when the spirit of the child, which follows him as a second shadow, 
might be between the axe and the wood 1 How climb a tree, if the 
infant spirit is also to essay the climbing, and fall, perhaps, to the 
injury of the infant lying in the hammock ? How hunt, when the 
arrow might pierce the accompanying spirit of the child, which would 
be death to the little mortal at home ? 
If, wandering through the woods, you happen to meet a tairv leaf 
formed very much in the shape of a corial (canoe), floating on a stream 
or pond, and furnished with a tiny wooden seat and paddle cut out and 
placed therein ; or should you, on stepping over a fallen tree, discover 
two sticks, each placed from the ground to the trunk of the tree, dis- 
turb them not, for they are sacred to a father's affectionate anxiety 
for the preservation of the infant spirit of his child. When the father 
wades through the water, the toddling spirit of the infant must p;iddle 
across in the tairu-leaf boat; and when his sire crosses over the 
stump, the little temporary bridge enables the infantile spirit to 
climb over. 
Thus the spirit of the child follows its father to the fields and re- 
turns with him to the house, to gamble between father and child, 
until age and some mysterious increasing sympathy attaches it exclu- 
sively to the body of the child whose spirit it is. 
I'.ut notwithstanding the greatest vigilance, the little spirit is some- 
