Articles which were considered of value by the owners were kept, not in these larger caves, but in little holes and crannies where they could be easily concealed. This practice still continues, both for legitimate and illegitimate purposes; it made it, for example, impossible to trace the stores which were stolen soon after our arrival. The natives are naturally secretive, and do not confide the whereabouts of their hiding-places, so that when a man dies his hoard is lost. One old leper, who was said to have some five tablets, reported to his friends that when Mr. Edmunds was making a wall on the estate, the men went so near his cache that he was in momentary dread of its discovery, but they passed it by; he died soon after, and all knowledge of it was lost. The most tragic story is the authenticated one of a man who disappeared with his secret store. He had been bargaining with visitors, and went to fetch for sale some of his hidden possessions; he was never heard of again. Presumably some accident happened, and he either fell down a cliff or was buried alive. Sometimes a man on his death-bed will give directions to his son as to where things are hidden, but natural landmarks alter, and this information seems seldom sufficient to enable the place to be recognised; treasure-hunting on Easter Island is therefore a most disappointing pursuit, as we found to our cost. Soon after our arrival a man died in the village who was said to have things hidden among the rocks in a part of the coast not far from the village. His neighbours turned out to dig. We offered high rewards for anything found, which were to be doubled if the objects were left untouched till our arrival on the scene, and we wasted much time ourselves superintending the search, but nothing appeared. A young man volunteered the information that he had a cave on Rano Kao where his father had hidden things, and another half-day was spent in riding to the spot; the whereabouts had only been described generally, and he could not find the place. Yet another day we rode round the eastern headland to find some stone statues, the locality of which had been confided to Juan by the old man Kilimuti, who was a member of his family. The search was again in vain, and Juan indignantly characterised his ancient relative as “a liar.” An interesting, but equally futile, expedition was made to look for a tablet, said to have been hidden by a rongo-rongo man near Anakena; the cave in this case proved to have an entrance like a well, artificially built up, and to be a long, natural, subterranean chamber. There were certain traces which might have been those of decayed wood, but nothing more. We subsequently discovered that this sort of thing is usual; the natives possess, not “castles in Spain,” but caves in certain localities which they speak of definitely as “theirs,” but which are quite as reluctant to materialise as any southern château.