These attachments are so shallow that if the fortune-teller who is always consulted gives an unfavorable forecast, the engagement is forthwith broken off.  It is instructive to note further that the rigid separation of a man from his betrothed serves merely to stifle legitimate love; its object cannot be to prevent improper intimacies, for before engagement the girls enjoy perfect liberty to do what they please, and after engagement they may converse with anyone except the lover.  As Parkyns (II., 41) tells us, he is never allowed to see his intended wife even for a moment, unless he can bribe some female friend to arrange it so he can get a peep at her by concealing himself; but if the girl discovers him she covers her face, screams, runs away, and hides.  This “coyness” is a pure sham.  In reality the Abyssinian girl is anything but coy.  Munzinger thus describes her character: 

“The shepherd girls in the neighborhood of Massua always earn some money by carrying water and provisions to the city.  The youngest girls are sent there heedlessly, and are often cheated out of more than their money, and therefore they do not usually make the best of wives, being coquettish and very eager for money.  The refinements of innocence must not be sought for in this country; they are incompatible with the simple arrangement of the houses and the unrestrained freedom of conversation.  No one objects to this, a family’s only anxiety being that the girl should not lose the semblance of virginity....  If a child is born it is mercilessly killed by the girl’s grandmother.”

Sentimental admirers of what they suppose to be genuine “pastoral love poetry” will find further food for thought in the following Abyssinian picture from Parkyns (II., 40): 

“The boys are turned out wild to look after the sheep and cattle; and the girls from early childhood are sent to fetch water from the well or brook, first in a gourd, and afterward in a jar proportioned to their strength.  These occupations are not conducive to the morality of either sex.  If the well be far from the village, the girls usually form parties to go thither, and amuse themselves on the road by singing sentimental or love songs, which not unfrequently verge upon the obscene, and indulge in conversation of a similar description; while, during their halt at the well for an hour or so, they engage in romps of all kinds, in which parties of the other sex frequently join.  This early license lays the foundation for the most corrupt habits, when at a later period they are sent to the woods to collect fuel.”

James Bruce, one of the earliest Europeans to visit the Abyssinians, describes them as living practically in a state of promiscuity, divorce being so frequent that he once saw a woman surrounded by seven former husbands, and there being hardly any difference between legitimacy and illegitimacy.  Another old writer, Rev. S. Gobat, describes the Abyssinians as light-minded, having nothing constant but inconstancy itself.  A more recent writer, J. Hotten (133-35), explains, in the following sentence, a fact which has often misled unwary observers: