In old days everyone was careful to have one good pig at least, in readiness for the day of his death, and any others which he might possess at the time of his departure, his friends were careful to kill in his honour. They carefully kept the days, principally the tens, I think, and religiously observed the 100th, after which remembrance seemed no longer necessary, but before that, I am afraid, there was a large amount of selfishness about the death days, and more was thought of the living in them than of the dead. The people tell me how strictly these days were kept formerly, they dispensed with their regular ordinary food sometimes for the whole 100 days, and ate only such roots and fruits as grow wild in the bush, religiously abstaining from all garden produce until the full time had expired. Some went even beyond this when a very particular person died, and for the whole 100 days ate only one kind of root, and that the most difficult to obtain, strenuously refusing to partake of food in common with others. I have known a man myself adhere to this rigid, self-imposed abstention, in the case of the death of a son, and of a wife, not here however, but at Opa. A man once came into my house over there, tired and hungry after a long fast and a laborious journey, but he strictly refused a biscuit or other food which I ventured to offer him, and when or where he ate I do not know, for the particular food he had chosen to eat was most rare in the neighbourhood, I doubt even if it was obtainable at all. Yet no privation or distress would force him to break his rule, and eat promiscuously until the proper time had elapsed. In the keeping of their days they are wonderfully accurate, and you seldom find them wrong in their calculations. Their fingers are their ready reckoners, and they have to do a great deal more work than ours in assisting a weak memory, where the use of slate and pencil are unknown. I very often ask people to count over the names of persons in the place or neighbourhood, just to see how clever and correct they are with their numbers. Here the whole ten fingers are used, at Opa only the left hand, five fingers down being five, the first finger up and the rest down six, and so on until all are up which makes ten, then two tens, three tens, up to ten tens or one hundred. In the distribution of food, too, it is wonderful how accurate they are, and it is very rarely that any one is left out of the count. Of course, where the science of numbers is unknown, nature teaches by a more roundabout, but scarcely less accurate process. For all practical purposes and uses, their fingers help them a great deal, indeed almost as far as their requirements go, for their lives are very simple and their ways uncomplicated. The leaves of a certain palm, however, lends them some assistance, especially in the distribution of food, and as the person is seen, or his name thought of, a leaf is broken off, and then the broken leaves are counted.