ABORS AND GALONGS. 61 



the slave. Moreover the marriage present given by custom to the bride's father is 

 on a sliding scale and can be so small, in addition to the fact that the payment is 

 made in instalments, that it is hardly conceivable that a man too poor to get a free 

 girl for himself could compensate the owner of the slave girl he wanted to marry. 

 Nor would a father, with a marriageable daughter, be at all likely to give her to a 

 slave husband. But it is possible that the man who woos in forma pauperis stays 

 free himself and becomes as it were supernumerary to the establishment in which his 

 wife still remains a slave. 



The master of the house has the power of life and death over his slaves. But 

 D . , . only in the rarest instances have cases been known in 



Punishment. J 



which slaves have been killed by their owners. The killing 

 of a slave in sudden anger, although of course not a punishable offence according 

 to Abor ideas, is strongly disapproved by the community as a whole. The Galong 

 method of inflicting capital punishment upon a hopelessly refractory slave is to hang 

 him. This punishment is so rare that it cannot be called a custom or practice. If a 

 slave cannot be made to work, or continually runs away, and beating him and putting 

 him in the stock has no effect, the custom is to sell him to some distant village. The 

 most careful enquiry has failed to elicit any evidence of the sacrifice of slaves to the 

 war god or any other spirit. 



The habits of Abor and Galong that have been noted in these pages make, 



it is feared, a record "dry as the remainder biscuit after 



Character. J 



a voyage." The bones of fact do not stir into life and 

 show us the hill-man standing out, a living creature from these pages. They cannot 

 present him as he is, a strange mixture of good and evil, a child of nature if ever 

 there was one. 



The more debased amongst the hillmen would, it is admitted, justify Portia's 

 judgment on her German suitor, but the better type of Abor and Galong, and he is 

 by no means uncommon outside the Minyong and Panggi clans, does not fall so low. 

 He certainly does his share of the work by clearing the " jhums" , helping at 

 harvest and building the houses and bridges. If he is full of curiosity and avariciously 

 inclined to set an inordinate value on his services to strangers visiting his country, he 

 possesses a certain dignity, is hospitable, cheery and honest, and may be relied 

 upon to carry a load to the place he says he will take it. This I have found 

 by experience he will do without supervision. He is not, according to his own 

 standard, treacherous, for unlike the Mishmi he will not deliberately invite any one 

 into his village and then murder him. But in his character cunning takes the place 

 of bravery, and he does not, most emphatically, court war like a mistress. 



The distance at which, until recently, he succeeded in keeping his neighbours of 

 Assam lent but little enchantment to the view that early writers took of the hill tribes- 

 man. One Mohomed Cazim unkindly remarks: "This evil-disposed race of moun- 

 taineers are many degrees removed from the line of humanity and are destitute of the 

 characteristic properties of a man." Beyond so uncompromising a description 

 no character sketch of the hill tribes could possibly venture. 



