You of course do not find the surrounding palm groves of Mekeo and the coast; nor do you generally see the waste space behind the houses, or the ring of garden plots outside the waste space, the position of the village on its ridge being usually hardly adapted to the latter.  You may, however, often find garden plots very near to the village.  Each family has its own house, and, except as regards the emone and their use, there are no separate houses for men or women, or for any class of them.

The Mafulu emone is an oblong building, erected on piles of very varying height, the interior floor being anything from 3 to 15 feet above the ground.  In size also it varies very much, but generally it is internally about 12 to 15 feet long from front to back, and about 8 to 12 feet in width.  The roof, which is thatched with long, rather broad leaves, is constructed on the ridge and gable principle, with the gable ends facing the front and the back, and the roof sloping on both sides in convex curves from the ridge downwards.  Remarkable and specially distinctive features of the building are the thatched roof appendages projecting from the tops of the two gable ends (front and back), the forms of which appendages are somewhat like a hood or the convex fan-shaped semicircular roof of an apse, and in construction are sometimes made as rounded overhanging continuations of the upper part of the roof, and sometimes as independent additions, not continuous with, and not forming parts of, the actual roof.  In front of the building, but not at the back, is a platform at a level about a foot below that of the inner floor, extending the whole length of the front of the building, and projecting forwards to a distance of from 2 to 5 feet.  The approach from the ground to this platform in the case of a high-built emone is a rudely constructed ladder, but when the building is only low and near the ground it is generally merely a rough sloping piece of tree trunk, or even only a stump.  The two gable ends are enclosed with walls made of horizontal tree branches, two or three of which are, at both the front and rear ends of the building, discontinued for a short distance in the centre, so as to leave openings.  These openings are, say, 2 feet or more above the level of the front outside platform, and 1 foot or more above that of the inside floor, and are usually very small; so that, in entering or leaving the building, you have to step up to, or even climb, and wriggle yourself through the opening, and then step down on the other side.  Inside the building you find the centre of the floor space occupied by a longitudinal fireplace, about 2 feet broad, extending from front to back of the building; and the floors on each side of this fireplace slope upwards somewhat from the visible level of the fire-place towards the sides of the building.  The fireplace part of the interior is, in fact, dropped to a level below that of the adjoining floors, so