3*22 
MARRIAGE. 
care of when discovered, they both died in about 
a week afterwards. No age is prescribed for ma- 
trimony, but young men under twenty-five years of 
age do not often obtain wives, there are exceptions, 
however, to this: I have seen occasionally young 
men of seventeen or eighteen possessing them. 
When wives are from thirty-five to forty years of 
age, they are frequently cast off by the husbands, or 
are given to the younger men in exchange for their 
sisters or near relatives, if such are at their disposal. 
Women are often sadly ill-treated by their hus- 
bands or friends, in addition to the dreadful life of 
drudgery, and privation, and hardship they always 
have to undergo ; they are frequently beaten about 
the head, with waddies, in the most dreadful 
manner, or speared in the limbs for the most trivial 
offences. No one takes the part of the weak or the 
injured, or ever attempts to interfere with the inflic- 
tion of such severe punishments. 
Few women will be found, upon examination, to 
be free from frightful scars upon the head, or the 
marks of spear-wounds about the body. I have 
seen a young woman, who, from the number of 
these marks, appeared to have been almost riddled 
with spear wounds. Upon this point Captain Grey 
remarks, vol. ii. p. 249. 
“ The early life of a young woman at all celebrated for beauty 
is generally one continued series of captivity to different masters, 
of ghastly wounds, of wanderings in strange families, of rapid 
flights, of bad treatment from other females amongst whom she 
