Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/231

Rh pair, as among the Soligas (India), where the girl and her lover run away to some neighboring village.

The survivals which follow are in such a disintegrated condition that it is impossible to decide to which class they may properly be referred. It will have been observed that, in all the ceremonies that have been described, the bridegroom is pretended to be regarded as an enemy, a person to be avoided. Hence we can understand the Abyssinian custom described by Mr. Mansfield Parkyns, who says that, as soon as a young man has become betrothed to a girl, he may not see her face. If he should chance to see her by stealth, she covers her face, screams, runs away, and hides; and this though the greatest intimacy may have prevailed between them before the betrothal. A modification of this custom is found in Ceylon, where, if a young man wishes to see the bride whom his father has selected for him, he must go clandestinely. If he enters the house it must be under a feigned name, and if he sees his intended he must not address her.

If the bridegroom is to be regarded as hostile to the bride, he must, by a similar fiction, be regarded as hostile to her family also; and hence the many cases in which proposals for marriage must be made through the intervention of third parties, a custom which has neither utility nor convenience to recommend it. Among the Turkomans "the young man does not dare to breathe his wishes to the parents of his beloved, for such is not etiquette, and would be resented as an insult." In Siam marriages are the subject of much negotiation, undertaken not directly by the parents, but by "go-betweens," nominated by those of the proposed bridegroom, who make proposals to the parents of the intended bride. Davis says the same of the Chinese,Chinese, vol. i, p. 266. and that the two persons principally interested never see each other. In Dahomey it is the custom for a suitor to dispatch two emissaries, a man and a woman, to open negotiations with the family of the girl he wishes to marry. In Samoa, Mr. Pritchard says, a man never personally woos his lady-love, and, in the case of a chief, it is the privilege of his attendants to do the courting for him.

These customs are evidently disintegrations of that observed by Caillié in the western Soudan. There, as soon as the suitor has declared himself, he is not allowed to see the father and mother of his future bride. He takes the greatest care to avoid them, and if by chance they perceive him they cover their faces, as if all ties of friendship were broken. The custom extends beyond the relations; for, if the lover is of a different camp, he