od was eaten under the same
roof; the family had their meals outside, or in another house. Those
who attended the deceased were most careful not to handle food, and
for days were fed by others as if they were helpless infants. Baldness
and the loss of teeth were supposed to be the punishment inflicted by
the household god if they violated the rule. Fasting was common at
such times, and they who did so ate nothing during the day, but had a
meal in the evening. The fifth day was a day of "purification." They
bathed the face and hands with hot water, and then they were "clean,"
and resumed the usual time and mode of eating.

The death of a chief of high rank was attended with great excitement
and display; all work was suspended in the settlement; no stranger
dared to pass through the place. For days they kept the body unburied,
until all the different parties connected with that particular clan
assembled from various parts of the islands, and until each party had,
in turn, paraded the body, shoulder high, through the village, singing
at the same time some mournful dirge. The body, too, was wrapped up in
the most valuable fine mat clothing which the deceased possessed.

_The burial_ generally took place the day after death. As many of the
friends as could be present in time attended. Every one brought a
present, and the day after the funeral these presents were all so
distributed again as that every one went away with something in return
for what he brought. The body was buried without a coffin, except in
the case of chiefs, when a log of wood was hollowed out for the
purpose. The body being put into this rude encasement, all was done up
again in some other folds of native cloth, and carried on the
shoulders of four or five men to the grave. The friends followed, but
in no particular order; and at the grave again there was often further
wailing and exclamations, such as, "Alas! I looked to you for
protection, but you have gone away; why did you die? would that I had
died for you!"

_The grave_ was called "the fast resting-place," and in the case of
chiefs, "the house thatched with the leaves of the sandal wood,"
alluding to the custom of planting some tree with pretty foliage near
the grave. There was no village burying-ground all preferred laying
their dead among the ashes of their ancestors on their own particular
ground. They carried the skulls of their dead from a land where they
had been residing during war back to