ce tells her
will lash her husband up to boiling-point. The later stanzas complain
that the singer has been taken from her own home among a nation of real
warriors to live among a gang of skulking cowards, whose hearts, livers,
and other vital organs are not at all up to the standard of her people.

The epithets are carefully arranged up a scale until they reach _bandy-
legged_--an utterly unpardonable insult. But there is, beyond this, one
other unpublishable remark, which causes the husband to take up the yam-
stick and fell the singer with one tremendous blow, which is frequently
so serious as to disable her for many days. The other women at once see
to their sister, who has incurred the wrath of her lord, and rub her
wounds with weird medicaments. The whole shocking business is regarded
as quite an ordinary affair; and after the sufferer is able to get about
again she bears her husband not the slightest ill-feeling. You see, she
has had her say and paid for it.

The girls, as they grow up, are taught to cook according to the native
fashion, and are also required to build ovens in the earth or sand; make
the fires, build "break-winds," and generally help their mothers in
preparing meals. When at length the meal is cooked, the manner of eating
it is very peculiar. First of all, the women retire into the background.
The lord and master goes and picks out the tit-bits for himself, and then
sits down to eat them off a small sheet of bark. More often, however, he
simply tears the meat in pieces with his hands. During his meal, the
wives and children are collected behind at a respectful distance,
awaiting their own share. Then, as the warrior eats, he literally hurls
certain oddments over his shoulder, which are promptly pounced upon by
the wives and children in waiting. It sometimes happens, however, that a
favourite child--a boy invariably, never a girl (it is the girls who are
eaten by the parents whenever there are any superfluous children to be
got rid of)--will approach his father and be fed with choice morsels from
the great man's "plate."

Each tribe has its own particular country over which it roams at
pleasure, and the boundaries are defined by trees, hillocks, mountains,
rocks, creeks, and water-holes. And from these natural features the
tribes occasionally get their names. Outside the tribal boundary--which
often incloses a vast area--the blacks never go, except on a friendly
visit to a neighbour