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Little Oddities ofLi/e
A Philippine Superstition
Forty years ago, the native chieftain
who earned this skull on his
shoulders stole the wife of Guanu,
another tribal chief. The
latter retaliated with a battleaxe,
and took this skull as a
trophy of his revenge. Upon
Guanu's death, the grinning
mask was placed upon his grave
as a tombstone, when immed
ately an orchid sprang from the
cleft in the frontal bone that had
been cut by Gu nu's battle-axe.
The natives guarded it zealously,
thinking it the spirit of their dead*
chief, but in 1902 a traveler passing
through the village saw it,
stole flower, skull and all, and
shipped it back to a florist of
Rutherford, New Jersey.
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