at at the same table with us even
to end a three-days' hunger. The groom, Harri Ram by name, was a
nice-looking boy of fourteen, clad in a velvet suit and apparently
pleased with the show of which he was It. There had already been a
three or four days' wedding ceremony at the bride's house, we were
told, and this was the fifth and last day of the ceremonies and feasts
arranged by the groom's father. One thousand people had been invited
and, judging from the richness of the food with which we were served,
I should think that my friend's estimate of the total cost, 5000
rupees, or $1633, was none too high.

Not only are the wedding ceremonies expensive, but a poor father, or a
father with several daughters to find husbands for, must often strain
his credit to the utmost in providing dowries. It is said that among
the humbler classes a father will sometimes mortgage his wages for
life to secure money for this purpose. Then, too, the marriage-broker
or middleman who has gone to the groom's father with the story that
the bride is "as beautiful as the full moon, as graceful as a young
elephant, and with a voice as sweet as a cuckoo's"--he must also be
paid for his indispensable services.

{240}

Not to be envied is the little damsel of twelve who leaves her
childhood home and goes out as the bride of a boy or man--whose face
she may never have seen but once or twice--to take up the hard life of
a Hindu wife in the home of her father-in-law and mother-in-law. Yet
from her infancy she has been bred in an atmosphere full of suggestion
of the inferiority of womankind, and to her it is probably not so
galling as we fancy that she is never accounted worthy of eating at
the same table with her husband, but must be content with what he
leaves. Even Christianity can move but slowly in bringing the people
to a higher appreciation of the dignity of womanhood. "Some of my
girls are engaged to be married," Mrs. Lee, of the Lee Memorial Home
in Calcutta, said to me, "and when their fiances come to call, after
the Christian fashion, the girls must remain standing as inferiors
while the boys are seated."

Once married, the Hindu wife has two things to dread: either that her
husband may die or that he may supplant her by a second wife. If she
lives seven years as a wife without giving birth to a son, the husband
is authorized by law and religion to take a second spouse; and in
nearly all such cases the lot of the first wife is a hard one