With a tribe in northeastern Asia, when a man feels his last hour has come, he must either kill himself or be killed by a friend. In another tribe he requests his son or some near relative to dispose of him, choosing the manner of death he prefers. So his friends and neighbors assemble and he is stabbed, strangled, or otherwise slain. Elsewhere, if a man dies a natural death, his corpse must be wounded, so that he may seem to be received with the same honors in the next world as if he had died in battle, as Odin wanted for his disciples. The Wends once killed their aged parents and other kinsfolk and boiled and ate their bodies, and the old folk “preferred to die thus rather than drag out a weary life of poverty and decrepitude.” Kings are killed when their strength fails. The people of Congo believed that if their pontiff died a natural death, the earth would perish, since he sustained it by his power and merit, and that everything would be annihilated. So his successor entered his house and slew him with a rope or club. “The king must not be allowed to become ill or senile lest with his diminishing vigor the cattle should sicken and fail to bear their increase, the crops should rot in the field, and man, stricken with disease, should die.” So the king who showed signs of illness or failing strength was put to death. One of the fatal symptoms of decay was taken to be incapacity to satisfy the sexual passion of his wives, of whom he has very many distributed in a large number of huts at Fashoda. When this ominous weakness manifested itself, the wives reported it to the chiefs, who were popularly said to have intimated to the king his doom by spreading a white cloth over his face and knees as he lay slumbering in the heat of the sultry afternoon. Execution soon followed the sentence of death. A hut was especially built for the occasion, the king was led to it and laid down with his head resting on the lap of a nubile virgin, the door of the hut was then walled up, and the couple were left without food, fire, or water, to die of hunger and suffocation. This custom persisted till five generations ago.