he night her lover would come, pull the string, and so
awaken the girl, who would then join him. As the chief of
Mabuiag said, 'What can the father do; if she wants the man
how can he stop her?'"

On Muralug Island the custom is somewhat different. There,
after the girl has sent her grass-ring to the man she wants,

"if he is willing to proceed in the matter, he goes to
the rendezvous in the bush and, not unnaturally, takes
every advantage of the situation. Every night
afterwards he goes to the girl's house and steals away
before daybreak. At length someone informs the girl's
father that a man is sleeping with his daughter. The
father communicates with the girl, and she tells her
lover that her father wants to see him--'To see what
sort of man he is?' The father then says, 'You like my
daughter, she like you, you may have her.' The details
are then arranged."

Sometimes, if a girl was too free with her favors to the men, the
other women cut a mark down her back, to make her feel ashamed. Yet
she had no difficulty on this account in subsequently finding a
husband.

Besides the existence of "free love," there are other customs arguing
the absence of sentiment in these insular affairs of the heart.
Infanticide was frequently resorted to, the babes being buried alive
in the sand, for no other reason than to save the trouble of taking
care of them. After marriage, in spite of the fact that the girl did
the proposing, she becomes the man's property; so much so that if she
should offend him, he may kill her and no harm will come to him. If
her sister comes to remonstrate, he can kill her too, and if he has
two wives and they quarrel, he can kill both. In that love-scene
reported by Maino, the chief of Tud, the girl gives us her
"sentimental" reasons why she loves him: because he has a fine leg and
body, and a good skin. The "romance" of the situation is further
aggravated when we read that, as in Australia, swapping sisters is the
usual way of getting a wife, and that if a man has no sister to
exchange he must pay for his wife with a canoe, a knife, or a glass
bottle. Chief Maino himself told Haddon that he gave for his wife
seven pieces of calico, one dozen shirts, one dozen singlets, one
dozen trousers, one dozen handkerchiefs, two dozen tomahawks, besides
tobacco, fish-lines and hooks and pearl shells. He finished his
enumeration by exclaiming "By