Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/172

142 against marital intercourse inside the house for a period varying in length from three to twelve days,—and where, in some tribes, they do not pass the night together at any time, since the men are required still to sleep in the bachelors' house, while the women and children sleep in separate family houses. The last stage of all marks, as it were, the retirement of the warrior from active life, and he is now permitted to live with the women and to leave the bachelors' house for good. The evidence for this grouping rests, in part on the allocation of ceremonial duties among these groups, in part on the actual narratives of the people themselves, and in part on the fact that greater responsibility attaches to the married than to the unmarried,—not that marriage is held by them to be, what it undoubtedly is, a liberal education in itself, but that it marks adult manhood from youth, completes the process by which the clan maintains itself, and is a title to full rights and duties.

A raid in order to get a head is a religious business, and not lightly undertaken, whatever its motive. They may think killing "fine sport," but they prepare themselves for the sport with solemn rites. Before, as well as after, a raid the young warriors are genna, secluded from intercourse or speech with women, compelled to live apart. It is strange to see how slight on the whole has been the mitigation of intertribal feud wrought by the law of exogamy, which is as fundamental in social belief as the duty of blood revenge. Here and there the women of especially warlike and powerful villages are eagerly sought in marriage, because their relations will avenge them if aught happens to them, but the feuds would still persist but for the gentle restraints of British administration. Marriage is entirely a peaceful arrangement, and war songs are forbidden at the wedding ceremonies, presum-