The Mayans were always--they are to-day--a laughter-loving race. It is the easiest thing in the world to make one of them laugh, and their merriment is from the heart, an ingenuous joy in life, a child's glee. And thus every important event in their lives, public or private, was taken advantage of as a fitting occasion for a dance or a feast. Public feasts were given by the caciques or in their honour. At these banquets much ceremony was observed, and, when departing, each guest was presented with a beautifully woven cotton mantle, a carved wooden stool, and a painted drinking-gourd. These guest-gifts were as much an essential part of the entertainment as they are in Japan, where indeed they take an even more practical and rather embarrassing form: for the happy diner on getting into his rickshaw may as likely as not find a raw fish wrapped in tissue paper or a dainty Satsuma bowl filled with lily bulbs packed away there for his delectation during his journey homeward. At the Mayan feasts rude mummeries were often presented to amuse the banqueters. These as often as not took the form of crude mystery plays, and were of course supplemented by the music of the _tunkul_ and reed flutes. Dancing was what the Mayans liked best; even to-day they will dance from sunrise to sundown if they get the chance. There were set dances assigned for every ceremony, public or private, in the Mayan city. The two chief dances were the dance of _canes_ (Mayan _lomche_) and the dance of flags. The first was a dance by four youths painted black from head to foot, and adorned with feathers and garlands. It lasted all day, with short intervals for drinking and eating. In the dance of banners several hundreds took part. The Mayans had no cemeteries. They buried their dead or burned them; but they had no common burial grounds. Corpses were usually buried inside the huts, which were thereafter taboo and abandoned. This was the custom for the ordinary citizen; the chiefs and the priests were buried in sepulchral mounds such as we have before described. In cases of cremation the ashes were collected, placed in urns of clay or wood, buried, and small mounds erected over them. Sometimes, in the case of the very great, the urn formed the nucleus for a temple which was built over it. Sometimes, instead of urns pottery figures were made and the ashes deposited in these, which were then placed in the temples. Sometimes, before burning, the scalp of the defunct was stripped off; part of the body was burnt and part buried, the ashes being put in an image of wood through the top of the head, which had been left open for the purpose, the image being then completed by the placing of the scalp on it as a cover.