These puddings are sometimes made on a gigantic scale, on the occasion of any great gathering of the tribes. One has been described to me as measuring twenty feet in circumference; and on the same occasion—namely, the marriage of old King Tanoa’s daughter to Ngavindi, the chief of the fisherman tribe—there was one dish of green leaves prepared, ten feet long by five wide, on which were piled turtles and pigs roasted whole: there was also a wall of cooked fish, five feet in height and sixty feet long. The puddings are generally made of _taro_, cooked and pounded, and made into small lumps, which are baked, and afterwards all heaped in one great pit lined with banana leaves, and mixed up with sugar-cane juice and pounded cocoa-nut. I have been told about one great feast for which nineteen gigantic puddings were prepared, the two largest being respectively nineteen and twenty-one feet in circumference. Verily our familiar Scottish haggis must bow to those Fijian cousins, and confess himself to be no longer the “Great chieftain of the pudding race.” Certainly the masses of food accumulated on these great days beat everything we have heard of even at ancient Scottish funeral feasts. Enormous ovens were prepared (they would be so still, at any great gathering of chiefs). They are simply great pits, perhaps ten feet deep and twenty in diameter, which are lined with firewood, on which is arranged a layer of stones: when these are heated the animals to be roasted are laid on them, with several hot stones inside each to secure cooking throughout. Then comes a covering of leaves and earth, and the baking process completes itself. This, on a smaller scale, is the manner in which our daily pig is cooked. I have seen a bill of fare which included fifty pigs roasted whole, seventy baked turtles, fifteen tons of sweet pudding, fifty tons of yams and _taro_, and piles of yangona root, besides many trifling dainties.[31] Happily for us, the puddings are not all nasty; some are rather nice; and one preparation of arrowroot bread is excellent. Our daily pork is not served here with the same unerring regularity as it was on our mountain trip, where we lived in an ever-present atmosphere of roast-pig, fatted-pig, or sucking-pig, as the case might be,—pig it was always. Here fish, and even fowl and occasional eggs, form a delightful variety; and of course we always have tinned provisions in case of need.