108 USEFUL PLANTS OF GUAM. 
made of rice and grated coconut. The women had their special 
feasts, dressing themselves in gala attire and decorating their persons 
with flowers and bright shells and beads. They arranged themselves 
in a ring of twelve or thirteen, remaining statio “ry, singing in verse 
their stories and traditions in perfect time and in three-part harmony 
“treble, contralto, and falsetto” accompanied at times by one of the 
chief men, who assist at these festivities, carrying the tenor. The 
words were accompanied by movements of the hands, with which 
they sounded rattles or castanets made of shells, all in such perfect 
time and with movements of the body and gestures fitting so well sith 
the words as to call forth no little admiration for their aptitude for 
learning things to which they apply themselves.“ 
BuRIAL CeREMOonTES. At funerals the demonstrations of erief were 
very extravagant, accompanied by much weeping, fasting, and sound- 
ing on shell trumpets. The wailing continued a week or longer, 
according to the affection and esteem in which the deceased was held. 
The people assembled, dolefully chanting, around a mound which they 
raised over the grave, or near it, decorated with flowers, palms, shells, 
and other things esteemed by them.’ The mother of the deceased 
usually cut off some hair as a souvenir of her grief, recording the 
nights that had passed since his death by knots ina cord worn around 
her neck. These demonstrations were ereater on the occasion of a high 
chief's or Chamorri’s death and at the death of a matron of distinction, 
for in addition to the ordinary manifestations of erief they would 
cover the streets with garlands of palms, erect arches and other devices 
expressive of mourning, destroy coconut trees, burn houses, break 
up boats, and raise before their houses the tattered sails as a sign of 
their grief and sorrow, and to their songs they added elegies no less 
eloquent than sorrowful, which erief would teach to the rudest and 
most barbarous among them, exclaiming with many tears, that thence- 
forth life would not be worth living, he being gone who was the life 
of all, the sun of their nobility, the moon which lighted them in 
the night of their ignorance, the star of all their deeds of prowess, 
the valor of their battles, the honor of their race, of their Village, of 
their land; and thus they would continue far into the night, praising 
the deceased, whose tomb they crowned with paddles as a symbol of 
one celebrated as a fisherman, or with spears as a device for the brave, 
or with both paddles and spears if he were both a brave warrior and 
an expert fisherman. ° 
“Garcia, Vida y Martyrio de Sanvitores, pp. 200-201, 1683. 
’ Chiefs were sometimes buried under buildings called ‘ great houses”? (debajo de 
unas casas que Haman grandes.) (Garcia, p. 220.) 
‘The recitation or chanting of elegies was called taitai, a word which is now used 
for the verbs “to read’? and “to pray.’’ The corresponding nouns ‘‘prayer’”? and 
“lecture” are called tinaitai. 
