The next day is the feast day.  The guests are in the special guest houses outside the village, where they are dressing for the dance.  They have probably arrived the day before, in which case they may have come into the village to watch the women dancing in the evening; but they are not regarded as having formally arrived.  These guests include married and unmarried men, women and children, nobody of the invited community being left behind, except old men and women who cannot walk.  The women have brought with them their carrying bags, in which they carry all their men’s and their own goods (e.g., knives, feathers, ornaments, etc.), including not only the things used for the ceremony, but all their other portable property, which they do not wish to expose to risk of theft by leaving at home.

They have also brought special ornamental bags to be used in the dance as mentioned below.

The people of the village in the meantime erect one, two, or three (generally three) trees in a group in the very centre of the village enclosure.

And now come the successive ceremonies of the feast, in which both married and unmarried men and women take part; in describing these ceremonies I will call the people of the community giving the feast the “hosts,” and the visitors attending it the “guests.”

First:  All or nearly all the men hosts go in a body out of the village to the guests’ houses, singing as they go.  They are all fully ornamented for a feast, but do not wear their special dancing ornaments, and they do not carry their spears, or as a rule any other weapons.  Each chiefs ornaments include a bunch of black cassowary feathers tied round his head behind, and falling down over his shoulders, this being his distinctive ornament; but otherwise his ornaments do not differ from those of the rest, except probably as regards quantity and quality.  The object of this visit is to ascertain if the guests are ready, and if they are not ready the men hosts wait until they are so.  Then the men hosts return to the village, singing as before, and all the guests, men and women, follow them; but they do not sing, and they do not enter the village.  The men hosts, on returning, retire to their houses and the view platforms, where also are the women hosts, thus leaving the village enclosure empty.

Second:  All the women guests, except two, then enter the village.  They are fully ornamented for the feast, but do not wear their special dancing ornaments.  They all have large carrying bags on their backs, not the common ones of everyday use, but the ornamental ones; and in these they carry and show off all their own and their husbands’ riches other than what they respectively are actually wearing.  They enter at one end of the village enclosure (I will hereafter call this the “entrance end”) by the side of the end emone of the village (this may be the chiefs true emone or it may be the secondary emone), and walk in single