ing. I'se been married befo'," was thor oughly imbued with the spirit of Eastern legislation. The Hindu woman's name being Frailty, she was married young; and being Folly, she seldom had the trouble of choosing for herself. Any time between the age of two and maturity she was given in marriage, perchance to an infant like herself, or per haps to a gray-haired Brahmin. A wise man in the days of Akber thought it not com mendable for the bride to be younger than eight or older than ten. One old writer says that the man who gives a girl in mar riage after she arrives at maturity, and the man who takes such a damsel, sinks to the region of torment; and the father, paternal grandfather and great grandfather of each shall be born again in dirt. The contract made in infancy constituted a perfect mar riage, although of course consummation was postponed until a proper age, and conferred upon the luckless girl all a wife's rights and all a widow's obligations, did her husband pass out of this life while she was growing up. If a father was so neglectful as not to select a suitable husband for his daughter, then he lost all authority over her, and the duty of finding her a partner devolved in succession on the paternal relatives, the grandfather, the brother, the uncle, the cousin, and failing these, on the mother. If no choice had been made by the time she had reached the mature age of eleven years, then the young lady could make her own selection. And this seems to be even now the law in the land lying between India's coral strand and the snow-capped Hima layas. (Code of Manu, Grady's Manual of Hindu Law, ch. i: Ayeen Akbery, vol. II, Page S51! Colebrooke's Hindu Law, vol. II. P. 377.) The adviser of the Emperor Akber (the greatest and wisest of the Mogul emperors, who died in 1605) considered that twentyfive was the proper age for a man to perpe trate wedlock and that it was folly to marry
after fifty. Manu declares it to be a father's duty to give his daughter in marriage to a young man of agreeable appearance and of the same rank as the maiden. A younger brother was not allowed to marry before his elder. If he did he went to hell. Full details are given in the law-books of India as to the kind of wife a man should select; what women and what families he should avoid in making his choice. He should shun families that, in modern par lance, do not go to church, nor read the Bible; those where all the olive-branches are of feminine gender, and those over whom phthisis or dyspepsia reigns. Girls whose hair suggests the old saying anent a white horse; those whose locks are like Bill Nye's or the celebrated Sutherland sis ters'; and girls who strive to solve the problem of perpetual motion with their tongues, are not to be thought of; nor are those to whom their parents were foolish enough to give names of snakes, rivers, trees, constellations or barbarian nations. When he finds one of his own class in whose form is no defect; whose name, like the Italian language, melts like kisses on a lady's lip, who walks gracefully and whose body is of exquisite softness, such a one he can wisely wed. (To this we even in this last decade of the nineteenth century say Amen.) According to Akber's learned men, the ideal woman is the virtuous wife who loves her husband; she is so modest that no man can ever see her looking at him; she never laughs loudly, nor smiles so as to show her teeth; she seldom speaks, and when she docs it is always in a low tone; is never in a passion, and never goes out of doors, even if she has the opportunity (which, by the way, her good man seldom offers her). In passing we may say that the Hindu pedants recognized three kinds of laughter: (1) smit, when there is a slight alteration in the cheeks, eyes and lips. (2) Wehrut, where the cachinnation is so great that the mouth opens; and (3) Aphust,
