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] death-days. If the deceased was a great man, a tavusmele, there will be a drum brought out and they will dance, to drive away their grief, as they say, so that they may eat the death-meal with cheerfulness; visitors come to dance and are paid for it. The death-feast lasts only five days for a woman, six for a man. The concluding action is peculiar to Lakona; on the sixth day after death each man kills a sow, and the women come and buy the meat, from which the last death-meal, called the Vulqat, is supplied. The next morning all is finished with a meal 'to clear away the Vulqat.'

The ghost when it leaves its former dwelling-place makes its way to Panoi, to which there are many entrances, called sura, in the various islands, some underground and unknown, some well known, like the rock Aliali on the mountain at Mota, volcanic vents on the burning hill Garat over the lake at Gaua, and the great mountain of Vanua Lava, the Sur-lav, great sura. The ghosts congregate on points of land before their departure, as well as at the mouth of the sura, where they are heard dancing, singing, shouting and whistling with land-crabs' claws on moonlight nights. To these points of land and the sura entrances to Panoi it was possible for ghosts who had already descended to return, and it was thought by some that they would come out to receive, sometimes with dancing, the freshly dead, shew them their various haunts, and conduct them to the underworld. There is also the notion that there are sura appropriated to particular classes of ghosts; as the sure tupa, where simple harmless people congregate, and the sure lumagav, where youths go who die in the flower of their age, a place more pleasant than the rest, where all kinds of flowers abound and scented plants. This fancy was mostly that of women, who thought much of all who died young, and above all of those who had been shot for them, who had died on their account, me matewolira ti, paid for them the price of their death.

A precise and consistent account of the condition of ghosts after they have arrived at Panoi, and of that place itself, is difficult indeed to obtain from the natives of this group; nor