MINNIKOY SOCIETY 189 



to encourage independence of character in a husband, 

 however much it may tend to soften and improve 

 his manners. 



The village is most carefully ordered, the houses, 

 which stand in their own little private enclosures, and 

 are built mostly of dressed coral stone, thatched with 

 palm leaf, being arranged in streets. No less carefully 

 are the inhabitants themselves grouped into a kind of 

 septs or fratries, or curice, which have their own streets, 

 their own bathing-tank, their own public-house or club 

 for the men, their own ladies' club or bower for the 

 women and girls, and their own places of worship and 

 burial. No policemen seem to be necessary, and no 

 police courts or prisons, for crime appears to be almost 

 unknown ; and the only -magistrate that we could hear 

 of was a headman, passing rich on a salary of some- 

 thing less than forty pounds a year, and wielding a 

 sort of mild patriarchal authority. 



The clubs or public-houses for the men filled me 

 with admiration. I call them "public-houses," but it 

 must be clearly understood that they have not the 

 remotest affinity with any British institution of that 

 name, seeing that the detestable and deplorable vices 

 of drinking bad liquor and consuming ill-smelling 

 tobacco (such as the liquor and tobacco of the bazars 

 of India) are not practised in them, and seem, indeed, 

 to be unknown in this blameless abode of men. On 

 the other hand, they may not be called ''meeting- 



