llowed to see his intended during the day.' He has
a tabooed hut apart, and 'if he is obliged to come out he covers his
face.' He 'remains with his wife only till daybreak'--like Cupid--and
flees, like Cupid, before the light. Among the Australians the chief
deity, if deity such a being can be called, Pundjel, 'has a wife
whose face he has never seen,' probably in compliance with some
primaeval etiquette or taboo.[69]

Among the Yorubas 'conventional modesty forbids a woman to speak to
her husband, or even to see him, if it can be avoided.'[70] Of the
Iroquois Lafitau says: 'Ils n'oscent aller dans les cabanes
particulieres ou habitent leurs epouses que durant l'obscurite de la
nuit.'[71] The Circassian women live on distant terms with their lords
till they become mothers.[72] Similar examples of reserve are reported
to be customary among the Fijians.

In backward parts of Europe a strange custom forbids the bride to
speak to her lord, as if in memory of a time when husband and wife
were always of alien tribes, and, as among the Caribs, spoke different
languages.

In the Bulgarian 'Volkslied,' the Sun marries Grozdanka, a mortal
girl. Her mother addresses her thus:--

Grozdanka, mother's treasure mine,
For nine long years I nourished thee,
For nine months see thou do not speak
To thy first love that marries thee.

M. Dozon, who has collected the Bulgarian songs, says that this custom
of prolonged silence on the part of the bride is very common in
Bulgaria, though it is beginning to yield to a sense of the
ludicrous.[73] In Sparta and in Crete, as is well known, the
bridegroom was long the victim of a somewhat similar taboo, and was
only permitted to seek the company of his wife secretly, and in the
dark, like the Iroquois described by Lafitau.

Herodotus tells us (i. 146) that some of the old Ionian colonists
'brought no women with them, but took wives of the women of the
Carians, whose fathers they had slain. Therefore the women made a law
for themselves, and handed it down to their daughters, that they
should never sit at meat with their husbands, and _that none should
ever call her husband by his name_.' In precisely the same way, in
Zululand the wife may not mention her husband's name, just as in the
Welsh fairy tale the husband may not even know the name of his fairy
bride, on pain of losing her for ever. These ideas about names, and
freakish ways of avoiding the use of names, mark the chil