Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/341

Rh the unmarried girls in Manipur. Some of them had black spots on the sides and tip of the nose, and I learnt that these lads had reached the age for marriage and thus advertised the fact. Among Nāgas the custom of head-hunting is associated with and regarded as proof of physical maturity, and therefore as evidence of social maturity and fitness for marriage, which is paralleled by an interesting survival in Manipur. The eldest son of the Raja is required, on attaining the age of twelve years, to take the silver-hilted dao which the king of Pong, the Shan kingdom, presented to King Khāgenba, and to go into the jungle and there to cut twelve bundles of firewood, and bring them home as proof of his courage and strength. Among the Tangkhuls we have, if the house tax has not by now entirely obliterated it, a custom by which, on marriage, a man succeeded to his father's office, if his father happened to be a village office holder, and also occupied his father's house, turning out the old people, who seem to have been allowed to return after a short while and then to live in an inferior portion of the house. The effect, if not the purpose, of this custom, in so far as it relates to village offices, is to secure continuously for the office a man in the plenitude of his strength, physical and mental. No one who is physically deformed or of weak intellect is allowed to hold office. The Tangkhul Nāgas also assume the ring at puberty, and in some Kabul villages there is a village genna or communal rite for the unmarried boys and girls. Dr. Webster asserts that the presence in a primitive community of the men's house in any one of its numerous forms points strongly to the existence, now or in the past, of secret initiation ceremonies. I cannot say that I have definite knowledge of any puberty or secret initiation rites performed in the Bachelors' Hall. I think it reasonable to regard the facts I have cited as