"As the lid of the coffin was being closed, an old man came out on the verandah of the house with a large gong (Tetawak) and solemnly beat it for several seconds. The chief, who was sitting near, informed me that this was done always before closing the lid, that the relations of the deceased might know that the spirit was coming to join them; and upon his arrival in Apo Leggan [Hades] they would probably greet him in such terms as these: 'O grandchild, it was for you the gong was beating, which we heard just now; what have you brought? How are they all up above? Have they sent any messages?'" The new arrival then delivers the messages entrusted to him, and gives the cigarettes--which, rolled up in a banana-leaf, have been placed in his hand--as proof of the truth of what he says. These cigarettes retain the smell of the hand that made them, which the dead relations are thought to be able to recognize. _Motherhood and Infanticide_. The intimate relationship recognized as existing between the infant and its mother has been among many primitive peoples a frequent cause of infanticide, or has been held at least to excuse and justify that crime. Of the natives of Ashanti, Ellis says:-- "Should the mother die in childbirth, and the child itself be born alive, it is customary to bury it with the mother.... The idea seems to be that the child belongs to the mother, and is sent to accompany her to _Srahmanadzi_ [ghost-land], so that her _srahman_ [ghost] may not grieve for it" (438. 234). Post states that in Unyóro, when the mother dies in childbirth, the infant is killed; among the Hottentots it was exposed (if the mother died during the time of suckling, the child was buried alive with her); among the Damara, "when poor women die and leave children behind them, they are often buried with the mother" (127. I. 287). According to Collins and Barrington, among certain native tribes of Australia, "when the mother of a suckling dies, if no adoptive parents can be found, the child is placed alive in the arms of the corpse and buried together with it" (125. II. 589). Of the Banians of Bombay, Niebuhr tells us that children under eighteen months old are buried when the mother dies, the corpse of the latter being burned at ebb tide on the shore of the sea, so that the next tide may wash away the ashes (125. II. 581). In certain parts of Borneo: "If a mother died in childbirth, it was the former practice to strap the living babe to its dead mother, and bury them both, together. 'Why should it live?' say they. 'It has been the death of its mother; now she is gone, who will suckle it?'" (481 (1893). 133). In certain parts of Australia, "children who have caused their mother great pain in birth are put to death" (127. I. 288), and among the Sakalavas of Madagascar, the child of a woman dying in childbed is buried alive with her, the reason given being "that the child may thus be punished for causing the death of its mother" (125. II. 590).