time.  The cell, like the rest of the house, is raised on piles above the ground, and is lit by a single small window opening on a lonely place, so that the girl is in almost total darkness.  She may not leave the room on any pretext whatever, not even for the most necessary purposes.  None of her family may see her all the time she is shut up, but a single slave woman is appointed to wait on her.  During her lonely confinement, which often lasts seven years, the girl occupies herself in weaving mats or with other handiwork.  Her bodily growth is stunted by the long want of exercise, and when, on attaining womanhood, she is brought out, her complexion is pale and wax-like.  She is now shewn the sun, the earth, the water, the trees, and the flowers, as if she were newly born.  Then a great feast is made, a slave is killed, and the girl is smeared with his blood.[96] In Ceram girls at puberty were formerly shut up by themselves in a hut which was kept dark.[97] In Yap, one of the Caroline Islands, should a girl be overtaken by her first menstruation on the public road, she may not sit down on the earth, but must beg for a coco-nut shell to put under her.  She is shut up for several days in a small hut at a distance from her parents’ house, and afterwards she is bound to sleep for a hundred days in one of the special houses which are provided for the use of menstruous women.[98]

Sec. 3. Seclusion of Girls at Puberty in the Torres Straits Islands and Northern Australia

[Seclusion of girls at puberty in Mabuiag, Torres Straits.]

In the island of Mabuiag, Torres Straits, when the signs of puberty appear on a girl, a circle of bushes is made in a dark corner of the house.  Here, decked with shoulder-belts, armlets, leglets just below the knees, and anklets, wearing a chaplet on her head, and shell ornaments in her ears, on her chest, and on her back, she squats in the midst of the bushes, which are piled so high round about her that only her head is visible.  In this state of seclusion she must remain for three months.  All this time the sun may not shine upon her, but at night she is allowed to slip out of the hut, and the bushes that hedge her in are then changed.  She may not feed herself or handle food, but is fed by one or two old women, her maternal aunts, who are especially appointed to look after her.  One of these women cooks food for her at a special fire in the forest.  The girl is forbidden to eat turtle or turtle eggs during the season when the turtles are breeding; but no vegetable food is refused her.  No man, not even her own father, may come into the house while her seclusion lasts; for if her father saw her at this time he would certainly have bad luck in his fishing, and would probably smash his canoe the very next time he went out in it.  At the end of the three months she is carried down to a fresh-water creek by her attendants, hanging on to their shoulders in such a way that her feet do not touch the ground, while the women of the tribe