302 
MISSION TO ASHANTEE. 
pactness in their movement, which is nevertheless very orderly. 
Two divisions of an army are rarely allowed to go the same path, 
lest, being in want of supplies, the neighbourhood should prove 
inadequate. Aboidvvee, our house master, (see correspondence on 
the Ashantee suicide) who has 1700 retainers, always precedes the 
King's or Apokoo's division, (which will exclusively occupy the 
Banda path in the invasion of Gaman) to raise a bamboo house for 
the King's reception when he comes up. 
Infants are frequently married to infants, for the connection of 
families; and infants are as frequently wedded by adults and 
elderly men. The ceremony is to send the smaller piece of cloth, 
worn around the middle, to the infant, and a handsome dash of 
gold to the mother, as her care then ceases to be a duty, but 
becomes a service performed to the husband, who also sends fre- 
quent presents for the support of the child. Apokoo told me it 
was a good plan for a man to adopt who wished to get gold, for as 
the circumstance was seldom generally known, the most innocent 
freedom when the girl became ten or eleven years old, grounded a 
palaver against the individual, though he might consider he was but 
fondling a child, and be wholly ignorant of her marriage. I after- 
wards understood from several 'others, that this view was the 
leading motive.* 
It frequently happens, when the family of the wife is too powerful 
for the husband to venture to put her to death for intrigue, that he 
takes off her nose as a stigma and punishment, and makes her the 
wife of one of his slaves. A wife who betrays a secret is sure to 
lose her upper lip, and, if discovered listening to a private conver- 
sation of her husband's, an ear. Women so maimed are to be met 
* On the Coast, the bride's character is very notoriously published, for part of the 
husband''s present to her family being a flask of rum, and that not sent until the next day;, 
whether it is brimful, or somewhat wanting, indicates her virginity, or early frailty. 
