annuated husband. In such cases the woman may take the
initiative. Dawson (65) once said to a native, "You should not have
carried Mary away from her husband"; to which the man replied, "Bael
(not) dat, massa; Mary come me. Dat husband wurry bad man: he waddy
(beat) Mary. Mary no like it, so it leabe it. Dat fellow no good,
massa."

Obviously, Australian elopement not only gives no indication of
romantic feelings, but even as an incident it is apt to be prosaic or
cruel rather than romantic, as our elopements are. In many cases it is
hard to distinguish from brutal capture, as we may infer from an
incident related by Curr (108-9). He was sleeping at a station on the
Lachlan.

"During the night I was awoke by the scream of a woman,
and a general yell from the men in the camp. Not
knowing what could be the matter, I seized a weapon,
jumped out of bed, and rushed outside. There I found a
young married woman standing by her fire, trembling all
over, with a barbed spear through her thigh. As for the
men, they were rushing about, here and there, in an
excited state, with their spears in their hands. The
woman's story was soon told. She had gone to the river,
not fifty yards off, for water; the Darling black had
stolen after her, and proposed to her to elope with
him, and, on her declining to do so, had speared her
and taken to his heels."

A pathetic instance of the cruel treatment to which the natives
subject girls who venture to have inclinations of their own was
communicated by W.E. Stanbridge to Brough Smyth (80). The scene is a
little dell among undulating grassy plains. In the lower part of the
dell a limpid spring bursts forth.

"On one side of this dell, and nearest to the spring at
the foot of it, lies a young woman, about seventeen
years of age, sobbing and partly supported by her
mother, in the midst of wailing, weeping, women; she
has been twice speared in the right breast with a
jagged hand-spear by her brother, and is supposed to be
dying."

CHARMING A WOMAN BY MAGIC

Besides the three ways already mentioned of securing a
wife--elopement, which is rare; capture, which is rarer still, and
_Tuelcha mura_, in which a girl is assigned to a man before she is
born, and while her prospective mother is still a girl herself--by far
the commonest arrangement--there is a fourth, charming by magic. Of
this, too,