rifle, or at most give a lift to one of the children. Yet it is
not because the men are callous, but because it is the custom. Their
fathers and forefathers did the same, and the women would be the
first to rebuke a young wife who ventured to complain or object.

Some of the women of the Povindah tribe are splendid specimens of
robust womanhood. These people travel hundreds of miles from Khorasan
to India, carrying their families and household goods with them, and
the women can load and manage the camels almost as well as the men,
and carry burdens better. The outdoor, vigorous, active life has made
them healthy, muscular, and strong, and buxom and good-looking withal,
though their good looks do not last so long as they would were their
life less rough. But when a baby is born, then comes the suffering. The
caravan cannot halt, and there is seldom a camel or ox available for
the woman to ride. She usually has to march on the next day, with the
baby in her arms or slung over her shoulder, as though nothing had
happened. Then it is that they endure sufferings which bring them to
our hospital, often injured for life. If there is no hospital, well,
they just suffer in silence, or--they die.

The Afghan noblemen maintain the strictest parda, or seclusion, of
their women, who pass their days monotonously behind the curtains
and lattices of their palace prison-houses, with little to do except
criticize their clothes and jewels and retail slander; and Afghan
boys of good family suffer much moral injury from being brought up
in the effeminate and voluptuous surroundings of these zenanas. The
poorer classes cannot afford to seclude their women, so they try to
safeguard their virtue by the most barbarous punishments, not only for
actual immorality, but for any fancied breach of decorum. A certain
trans-frontier chief that I know, on coming to his house unexpectedly
one day, saw his wife speaking to a neighbour over the wall of his
compound. Drawing his sword in a fit of jealousy, he struck off her
head and threw it over the wall, and said to the man: "There! you are
so enamoured of her, you can have her." The man concerned discreetly
moved house to a neighbouring village.

The recognized punishment in such a case of undue familiarity would
have been to have cut off the nose of the woman and, if possible,
of the man too. This chief, in his anger, exceeded his right, and if
he had been a lesser man and the woman had had powerful r