Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/228

216 have a curious custom of stealing their neighbors' wives, of course not without their secret assent. In such cases the stolen wife belongs to her ravisher, who pays the husband a good sum as compensation."

The next disintegration is, perhaps, to be found in those cases in which the women seize the bride and drag her to her suitor's house. This form occurs among the Greenlanders.

The next is where the violence, or feigned violence, takes the form of tearing the bride's clothes. This form is found among the Tunguses and Kamchadales, of whom Ernan says a matrimonial engagement is not considered as definitely concluded till the lover has got the better of his bride "and has torn her clothes." A variety of this form is found in Circassia, where an important part of the marriage ceremony consists in the bridegroom drawing his dagger and cutting open the bride's corset.

The next is where the appearance of violence is still further eliminated, and custom only requires the bridegroom to carry his bride to his house. This form is observed by the Indians of Canada, where the bridegroom takes his wife on his back, and, amid the plaudits of the spectators, carries her to his tent. The Western tribes of North America "regard it as an important part of the marriage ceremony that the bride should be carried to her husband's dwelling. In Mexico, also, the husband took the bride on his back and carried her a short distance. Bruce, in Abyssinia, observed an identical custom." Speke witnessed a similar ceremony at Karague, East Africa, and this form is also observed by the Susus, West Africa, with whom, however, the bride is sometimes carried on the back of a woman.

From carrying the bride on the back, to simply lifting or forcing her over the threshold of the bridegroom's house, the transition is easy. In the patrician marriages of the Romans the bridegroom had to carry the bride over the threshold of the house, and among the Bedouin Arabs it is necessary for the bridegroom to force the bride to enter his tent. A similar custom existed among the French, at least in some provinces, in the seventeenth century. At Sparta, after the actual carrying off of the bride had fallen into desuetude, the bridegroom had to take up the bride and carry her from one room to another. In China, before the bridal procession starts, the young sisters and female friends of the bride come and weep with her till it is time to leave the house of her parents; and when the procession reaches the bridegroom's house the bride is carried into the house by a matron, and lifted over a pan of charcoal at the door. A variation of this