The yaqona root, from a twig or two of which the kava drink was brewed, might have been an enormous ash-tree stool, with partly-grown ground-shoots, uprooted from an English copse. The stripping of the bark, the pounding it with stones, the macerating it with water in a big carved wooden bowl, and its presentation to the Prince and other guests in coco-nut shells, was performed with solemn chanting. The ceremony included the stretching of a coco-nut fibre string, strung at intervals of a few feet with cowrie-shells, in token of Royal authority, between the Prince's chair and the men preparing the kava. To cross this string, in days gone by, while the proceedings were in progress, would have involved nothing less than to be clubbed to death. Those were doubtless days when such functions were less chronicled and more respected. Timed clapping, which sounded like the thuds of successive buckets of water thrown from an upper window upon the pavement, completed the first part of the performance. A "meke"--dance--by three hundred gorgeously caparisoned Fijian warriors, wielding each an ancient battle-axe, which followed, was a marvel of well-timed movement. The muddy ground shook as the men stamped in unison, their bodies swaying in perfect rhythm as they acted the spirited paddling of canoes, the hauling at ropes, the pointing at the enemy, the leaping from the boat to the attack, and, after the fight was over, the sad breaking of the waves upon the shore. Their deep "Dua-ho," or grunt of welcome to the Prince, might have been the roll of many drums. The final stage in the performance came with the marching up of some hundreds of white-garbed bearers, each carrying a locally woven mat. These mats, some of them of a texture that challenged the fineness of a Panama straw hat, were deposited upon the ground in front of the Prince in a heap that grew to the dimensions of a small haystack before the last had been laid upon it, and this, although special steps had been taken to reduce the number of the offerings by restricting the issue of permissions to contribute.