the idea evidently was to convey to the mourners the assurance that the ghost was alive, and that in the person of the dancer he visited his friends; the assurance of his life after death comforted the bereaved ones[386]. If it be asked why this personating of the deceased should be accompanied by dancing, the answer probably is that as dancing was the most usual way of honouring the departed, it would be thought of as the most efficacious means of attracting them. The Sioux, another North American Indian tribe, also performed dances at graves as a mourning rite, for they believed that in doing so they were, in some undefined way, joined by the departed in this dance[387]. It is very likely that the common custom of dances at funeral feasts originally had a similar object. Among the Esquimaux, for example, there are always dances at the funeral feasts, the dead are invited in song to come to the feast; offerings of food are made to them, and they feast and dance together with the living. At their great festival of the dead, which is held every few years, the dances are an important feature. The dancers dance on the graves, and on the ice if the deceased met their death by drowning[388]. Here we seem to have the purposes separately; the dancing at the funeral feasts is a joining together with the departed, the dancing on the graves is in their honour. A very different purpose of the dance as a mourning rite next claims attention. That it sometimes has the object of appeasing the wrath of the departed, _i.e._ of their ghosts, is shown, for instance, by the fact that when among the inhabitants of Timor, an island in the East Indies, a head-hunter returns home after a successful expedition, sacrifices are offered to the man who has lost his head; and part of the ceremony consists of a dance accompanied by a song in which the death of the slain man is lamented and his forgiveness is entreated. “Be not angry,” they say, “because your head is here with us; had we been less lucky our heads might now have been exposed in your village. We have offered the sacrifice to appease you. Your spirit may now rest and leave us at peace[389].”