or other things in a corner of the hut, seeing
no one and speaking to no one, and during this time she may eat neither
flesh nor fish. Meantime a man beats a drum in front of the house.[136]
Similarly among the Tobas, another Indian tribe of the same region, when
a chief's daughter has just attained to womanhood, she is shut up for
two or three days in the house, all the men of the tribe scour the
country to bring in game and fish for a feast, and a Mataco Indian is
engaged to drum, sing, and dance in front of the house without
cessation, day and night, till the festival is over. As the merrymaking
lasts for two or three weeks, the exhaustion of the musician at the end
of it may be readily conceived. Meat and drink are supplied to him on
the spot where he pays his laborious court to the Muses. The proceedings
wind up with a saturnalia and a drunken debauch.[137] Among the Yaguas,
an Indian tribe of the Upper Amazon, a girl at puberty is shut up for
three months in a lonely hut in the forest, where her mother brings her
food daily.[138] When a girl of the Peguenches tribe perceives in
herself the first signs of womanhood, she is secluded by her mother in a
corner of the hut screened off with blankets, and is warned not to lift
up her eyes on any man. Next day, very early in the morning and again
after sunset, she is taken out by two women and made to run till she is
tired; in the interval she is again secluded in her corner. On the
following day she lays three packets of wool beside the path near the
house to signify that she is now a woman.[139] Among the Passes, Mauhes,
and other tribes of Brazil the young woman in similar circumstances is
hung in her hammock from the roof and has to fast there for a month or
as long as she can hold out.[140] One of the early settlers in Brazil,
about the middle of the sixteenth century, has described the severe
ordeal which damsels at puberty had to undergo among the Indians on the
south-east coast of that country, near what is now Rio de Janeiro. When
a girl had reached this critical period of life, her hair was burned or
shaved off close to the head. Then she was placed on a flat stone and
cut with the tooth of an animal from the shoulders all down the back,
till she ran with blood. Next the ashes of a wild gourd were rubbed into
the wounds; the girl was bound hand and foot, and hung in a hammock,
being enveloped in it so closely that no one could see her. Here she had
to stay for thr