Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/275

Rh attend their birth such as threatened the birth of the first-born. In all cases where no doctor has attended the actual birth, the father, whether absent or present, has complete control over the child, and no step can be taken without first consulting him, consequently sometimes rather strange complications arise. For instance, numbers of Basuto leave the country every year to find work in the mines and on the railways. Many of them are married men with young children. Suppose a man left a wife and baby a few months old behind him, his wife must not wean the child until he returns. The result is that every now and then one comes across quite big children, able to run about and even to talk, who are still unweaned, and, when asked, the mother will reply, "My husband has not yet returned."

Should a woman die while her child is still too young to be fed with a spoon, a sheep or goat is killed, and the windpipe, thoroughly cleansed, is used as a feeding tube, down which the milk is slowly poured into the child's throat. Sometimes a female goat in milk is procured, and the child taught to drink from its udder. In these cases the goats become more attached to their foster-children than to their own offspring, and will return at regular intervals to the hut to suckle the child. It is a strange sight to watch a goat run bleating to the door of a hut out of which crawls a fat brown baby, over whom she rejoices as if it were her own, lying down contentedly to allow it to drink until, thoroughly satisfied, the child retires to sleep, when the goat trots off to graze near by, returning again to her charge in a few hours.

When a youth wishes to marry he does not go to his father and ask for a wife. Such a course of action would