wife's gallant, if
he can produce any proofs of a criminal conversation, he recovers for
damages forty cows, forty horses, and forty suits of clothes, and the
same number of other things. If the gallant be unable to pay him, he is
committed to prison, and continues there during the husband's pleasure,
who, if he sets him at liberty before the whole fine be paid, obliges him
to take an oath that he is going to procure the rest, that he may be able
to make full satisfaction. Then the criminal orders meat and drink to be
brought out, they eat and drink together, he asks a formal pardon, which
is not granted at first; however, the husband forgives first one part of
the debt, and then another, till at length the whole is remitted.

A husband that doth not like his wife may easily find means to make the
marriage void, and, what is worse, may dismiss the second wife with less
difficulty than he took her, and return to the first; so that marriages
in this country are only for a term of years, and last no longer than
both parties are pleased with each other, which is one instance how far
distant these people are from the purity of the primitive believers,
which they pretend to have preserved with so great strictness. The
marriages are in short no more than bargains, made with this proviso,
that when any discontent shall arise on either side, they may separate,
and marry whom they please, each taking back what they brought with them.

CHAPTER IV

An account of the religion of the Abyssins.

Yet though there is a great difference between our manners, customs,
civil government, and those of the Abyssins, there is yet a much greater
in points of faith; for so many errors have been introduced and ingrafted
into their religion, by their ignorance, their separation from the
Catholic Church, and their intercourse with Jews, Pagans, and
Mohammedans, that their present religion is nothing but a kind of
confused miscellany of Jewish and Mohammedan superstitions, with which
they have corrupted those remnants of Christianity which they still
retain.

They have, however, preserved the belief of our principal mysteries; they
celebrate with a great deal of piety the passion of our Lord; they
reverence the cross; they pay a great devotion to the Blessed Virgin, the
angels, and the saints; they observe the festivals, and pay a strict
regard to the Sunday. Every month they commemorate the assumption of the
Virgin Mary, and are of o