he heads of two
innocent Chinese with no other object in view when
doing so than to secure the pseudo affections of women,
who refused to marry them until they had thus proved
themselves to be men."

Here is what a sweet Dyak maiden said to a young man who asked for her
hand and heart:

"Why don't you go to the Saribus Fort and there take
the head of Bakir (the Dyak chief), or even that of
Tuan Hassan (Mr. Watson), and then I will deign to
think of your desires with some degree of interest."

Says Captain Mundy (II., 222):

"No aristocratic youth dare venture to pay his
addresses to a Dyak demoiselle unless he throws at the
blushing maiden's feet a netful of skulls! In some
districts it is customary for the young lady to desire
her lover to cut a thick bamboo from the neighboring
jungle, and when in possession of this instrument, she
carefully arranges the _cadeau d'amour_ on the floor,
and by repeated blows beats the heads into fragments,
which, when thus pounded, are scraped up and cast into
the river; at the same time she throws herself into the
arms of the enraptured youth, and so commences the
honeymoon."

Another account of Dyak courtship (Roth, II., 166) represents a young
warrior returning from a head-hunting expedition and, on meeting his
beloved, holding in each hand one of the captured heads by the hair.
She takes one of the heads, whereupon they dance round each other with
the most extravagant gestures, amidst the applause of the Rajah and
his people. The next step is a feast, at which the young couple eat
together. When this is over, they have to take off whatever clothes
they have on and sit naked on the ground while some of the old women
throw over them handfuls of paddy and repeat a prayer that they may
prove as fruitful as that grain.

"The warrior can take away any inferior man's wife at
pleasure, and is thanked for so doing. A chief who has
twenty heads in his possession will do the same with
another who may have only ten, and upwards to the
Rajah's family, who can take any woman at pleasure."

FICKLE AND SHALLOW PASSION

Though the Dyaks may be somewhat less coarse than those Australians
who make a captured woman marry the man who killed her husband, an
almost equal callousness of feeling is revealed by J. Dalton's
statement that the women taken on the head-hunt