one_,
true or otherwise, in one village.

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