light when one day a man, who was travelling with his servant, saw them washing paint off their faces, “so they knew that they had deceived the people, and the people gathered together and killed them.” In these internecine fights fire was very generally set to the enemy’s dwellings. “He often burnt houses,” a young man said, pointing to an older one, and the impeachment was not denied. The ahu, too, were raided and bodies burnt, which seems to be the cause of the burnt bones recorded by certain travellers; there is no reason to suppose there was cremation or sacrifice on Easter Island. It was in this sort of warfare that the last images were overthrown. [Illustration: FIG. 92. [_Brit. Mus._ OBSIDIAN SPEAR-HEADS. (_Mataa._) ] While legends record how many people were eaten after each affray, all living persons deny, with rather striking unanimity, not only that they themselves have ever been cannibals, but that their fathers were so. If this is correct, the custom was dying out for some reason before the advent of Christianity;[45] their grandfathers, the old people admit, ate human flesh, but, if there were any rites connected with it, they “did not tell.” The great-grandmother of an old man of the Miru clan was, according to his account, killed on the high central part of the island by the Ureohei and eaten. In revenge for the outrage, one of her sons, Hotu by name, killed sixty of the Ureohei. Another son, who had pacifist leanings, thought the feud ought then to be ended, but Hotu desired yet more victims, and there was a violent quarrel between the two brothers, in which the peace-maker was struck on the head with a club; for, as Hotu remarked, if they had slain his father, it would have been different, but really to eat his mother was “no good.”