elations,
he might have been brought to regret it. But as a rule a woman has no
redress; she is the man's property, and a man can do what he likes
with his own. This is the general feeling, and no one would take
the trouble or run the risk of interfering in another man's domestic
arrangements. A man practically buys his wife, bargaining with her
father, or, if he is dead, with her brother; and so she becomes his
property, and the father has little power of interfering for her
protection afterwards, seeing he has received her price.

The chief exception is marriage by exchange. Suppose in each of
two families there is an unmarried son and an unmarried daughter;
then they frequently arrange a mutual double marriage without any
payments. In such cases the condition of the wives is a little, but
only a little, better than in the marriage by purchase. If a man and
a woman are detected in immorality, then the husband is at liberty
to kill both; but if he lets the man escape, he is not allowed to
kill him subsequently in cold blood. If he does, then a blood-feud
will be started, and the relations of the murdered man legitimately
retaliate, or he must pay up the difference in the price between
that of a man's life and that of a woman's honour. In practice, one
often finds that a man has been murdered where, by tribal custom,
he should only have had his nose cut off; as it is obviously easier
for the aggrieved husband to ambush and shoot him unawares than to
overpower him sufficiently to cut off his nose.

Every year in the mission hospital we get a number of cases, many
more women than men, where the sufferer has had the nose cut off by
a clean cut with a knife, which sometimes cuts away a portion of the
upper lip as well. This being a very old mutilation in India, the
people centuries ago elaborated an operation for the removal of the
deformity, whereby a portion of skin is brought down from the forehead
and stitched on the raw surface where the nose had been cut off, and
we still use this operation, with certain modifications, for the cases
that come to us. Two years ago a forbidding-looking Afghan brought
down his wife to the Bannu Mission Hospital. In a fit of jealousy he
had cut off her nose, but when he reflected in a cooler moment that
he had paid a good sum for her, and had only injured his own property
and his domestic happiness, he was sorry for it, and brought her for
us to restore to her as far as possible her pri