The third feast[14] is held after the end of the harvest, when the year’s crop has been carefully stowed away. A pig and fowls are killed, for four days gong-beating and dancing are kept up, and the taboo lasts for eight days. Sometimes no stranger may approach the village for sixteen days. At this period also the soul of the rice is likewise secured, which is to ensure the non-rotting of the crop. At this feast there is a general physicking of the children. They are washed with cocoa-nut water, and then laid down in a row in the common room where the feast is held, and scarcely suffered to move about for four days. At this time also the elder priestesses physic their younger sisters, and children of a tender age are entered among the number of this learned and accomplished body; partly because admission into it is supposed to secure them against violent sickness. For each one who is now to be initiated, a young cocoa-nut is obtained, and their elder sisters cause those on whom they are to exercise their power to lie down in a line along the room, and to cover themselves with long sleeping sheets. The cocoa-nuts belonging to the patients are then taken into the hands of the priestesses, and with them they run violently about the long room, tossing them up and down and to and fro. In some villages they are rolled in soot and oil, and then kicked furiously about from one priestess to the other. During this part of the process the room presents a curious scene. Here some six or seven gaily-dressed women are rushing frantically up and down, tossing in their hands the heavy young cocoa-nuts; there a dozen old women are moving to and fro on a rude swing suspended from the rafters, and howling dolefully round the altar. A number of others are shrieking and dancing; while from the farther end of the room beyond the line of prostrate patients resounds a clatter of gongs and drums, beaten as vigorously as twenty pair of young hands can apply themselves to the work.