Food would be laid down before them and kneeling, or on all-fours like dogs, they had to pick it up with their teeth.

Perhaps their lot might be so far mitigated that a maiden would be permitted to convey food to their mouths on the end of a fern-stalk--a much less disagreeable process for the eater.

Growing fields of the sweet potato were sacred for obvious reasons, as were those who were working therein.

So were burial-places and the bones of the dead.

The author above-mentioned chancing one day on a journey to pick up a human skull which had been left exposed by a land-slide, immediately became an outcast shunned by acquaintances, friends and his own household, as though he were a very leper.