and have each a great marriage feast provided for them.  One of them was about fourteen or fifteen years old, and the chief told us that she had been there for five years, but would soon be taken out now.  The other two were about eight and ten years old, and they have to stay there for several years longer."[91] A more recent observer has described the custom as it is observed on the western coast of New Ireland.  He says:  “A buck is the name of a little house, not larger than an ordinary hen-coop, in which a little girl is shut up, sometimes for weeks only, and at other times for months....  Briefly stated, the custom is this.  Girls, on attaining puberty or betrothal, are enclosed in one of these little coops for a considerable time.  They must remain there night and day.  We saw two of these girls in two coops; the girls were not more than ten years old, still they were lying in a doubled-up position, as their little houses would not admit of them lying in any other way.  These two coops were inside a large house; but the chief, in consideration of a present of a couple of tomahawks, ordered the ends to be torn out of the house to admit the light, so that we might photograph the buck.  The occupant was allowed to put her face through an opening to be photographed, in consideration of another present."[92] As a consequence of their long enforced idleness in the shade the girls grow fat and their dusky complexion bleaches to a more pallid hue.  Both their corpulence and their pallor are regarded as beauties.[93]

[Seclusion of girls at puberty in New Guinea, Borneo, Ceram and Yap.]

In Kabadi, a district of British New Guinea, “daughters of chiefs, when they are about twelve or thirteen years of age, are kept indoors for two or three years, never being allowed, under any pretence, to descend from the house, and the house is so shaded that the sun cannot shine on them."[94] Among the Yabim and Bukaua, two neighbouring and kindred tribes on the coast of German New Guinea, a girl at puberty is secluded for some five or six weeks in an inner part of the house; but she may not sit on the floor, lest her uncleanness should cleave to it, so a log of wood is placed for her to squat on.  Moreover, she may not touch the ground with her feet; hence if she is obliged to quit the house for a short time, she is muffled up in mats and walks on two halves of a coconut shell, which are fastened like sandals to her feet by creeping plants.  During her seclusion she is in charge of her aunts or other female relatives.  At the end of the time she bathes, her person is loaded with ornaments, her face is grotesquely painted with red stripes on a white ground, and thus adorned she is brought forth in public to be admired by everybody.  She is now marriageable.[95] Among the Ot Danoms of Borneo girls at the age of eight or ten years are shut up in a little room or cell of the house, and cut off from all intercourse with the world for a long