ned, and have to be fetched. This may involve a delay of a week
or ten days, during which most or all of the guests remain, sleeping
in their guest houses at night, and perhaps roaming about among other
villages in the neighbourhood by day. During this interval there is
neither singing nor dancing.

Thirteenth: The village pigs are all brought in alive, and placed under
the houses of the village, each pig having its legs tied up and being
tied to the house. When all is ready, the chief of the clan announces
that the killing of the pigs will take place on the following morning.

Fourteenth: The next morning all the people, both hosts and guests,
are in the village to watch the pig-killing; and people from other
communities, who are not guests, and will not receive any pig, come
too. The pigs are brought out one by one, and killed by hitting them
on the head with clubs or adzes or anything else. This is not a chiefs
duty. There is a man who is the recognised pig-killer, and who, as
already stated, will probably be a man of some position, though not
either a chief or a sub-chief. Where there are many pigs, as at the
big feast, there will be a number of other men helping him. Each pig is
killed on the site of the burial platform which has been cut down. As
the pigs are killed, their bodies are carried away and placed on the
ground in a row, commencing at the end of the village enclosure, and
forming a central line along it; and it is usual also to place upon the
row of dead pigs a continuous line of long thin poles, laid end to end,
which are afterwards kept tied to the _emone_ as a record of the total
length of the line of pigs, and thus of the number of pigs killed. The
number of pigs killed is generally very large in proportion to the
size of the community giving the feast, much more so than is the case
in the villages of Mekeo and the coast. It may be anything from fifty
to over one hundred; in fact at a recent feast given by a community
of seven villages, having between them about a hundred houses, they
killed 135 pigs. Some chiefs of the hosts' community then take some
of the bones (not skulls) from the big posts, and dip them into the
mouths of the pigs, from which the blood is flowing. They have been
seen to dip one bone into several pigs. There does not appear to be
any method of selection of the bones to be dipped. They then touch
with the bones which have been so dipped the skulls and all the other
bones on the