grease.  This grease argument she was unable to resist, so she entreated her father to give his consent.  At this he broke out in a towering passion, threw cradle and other chattels out of the door and ordered her to follow at once.  The girl’s mother now interceded, whereupon “seizing her by the hair, he hurled her violently to the ground and beat her with his clenched fists till I thought he would break every bone in her body.”  The next morning, however, he went to the lodge of the newly married couple, made up, and they returned, bag and baggage, to his tent.

Grease appears to play a role in the courtship of northern Indians too.  Leland relates (40) that the Algonquins make sausages from the entrails of bears by simply turning them inside out, the fat which clings to the outside of the entrails filling them when they are thus turned.  These sausages, dried and smoked, are considered a great delicacy.  The girls show their love by casting a string of them round the neck of the favored youth.

PANTOMIMIC LOVE-MAKING

It is noticeable in the foregoing accounts that courtship and even proposal are apt to be by pantomime, without any spoken words.  The young Piute who visits his girl while she is in bed with her grandmother “does not speak to her.”  The Nishinam hunter leaves his presents and they are accepted “without a word being spoken;” and the Apaches, as we saw, “pop the question” with stones or ponies.  Why this silent courtship?  Obviously because the Indian is not used to playing so humble a role as that of suitor to so inferior a being as a woman.  He feels awkward, and has nothing to say.  As Burton has remarked (C.S., 144), “in savage and semi-barbarous societies the separation of the sexes is the general rule, because, as they have no ideas in common, each prefers the society of its own.”  “Between the sexes,” wrote Morgan (322)

“there was but little sociality, as this term is understood in polished society.  Such a thing as formal visiting was entirely unknown.  When the unmarried of opposite sexes were casually brought together there was little or no conversation between them.  No attempts by the unmarried to please or gratify each other by acts of personal attention were ever made.  At the season of councils and religious festivals there was more of actual intercourse and sociality than at any other time; but this was confined to the dance and was in itself limited.”

HONEYMOON

It is needless to say that where there is no mental intercourse there can be no choice and union of souls, but only of bodies; that is, there can be no sentimental love.  The honeymoon, where there is one,[242] is in this respect no better than the period of courtship.  Parkman gives this realistic sketch from life among the Ogallalla Indians (O.T., ch.  XI.):