In these hamlets women are far more numerous than men.  Marriage being expensive amongst the “Mfumo” or gentry, the houses are stocked with Hagars, and the children inherit their father’s rank as Mwana Mfumos, opposed to Mwanangambe, labouring people, or Wantu, slaves.

The missionaries found a regular system of “hand-fasting.”  Their neophytes did not approve of marriage in facie ecclesiae, “for they must first be satisfied whether their wife will have children; whether she will be diligent in her daily labour, and, lastly, whether she will prove obedient, before they will marry her.  If they find her faulty in any of these points, they immediately send her back again to her parents.”  The woman, not being looked upon the worse for being returned into stores, soon afterwards underwent another trial, perhaps with success.  Converts were fined nine crowns for such irregularities.  “But, oh!” exclaims a good father, “what pains do we take to bring them to marry the lover, and how many ridiculous arguments and reasons do they bring to excuse themselves from this duty and restraint.”  He tells us how he refused absolution to a dying woman, unless she compelled her daughter to marry a man with whom she was “living upon trial.”  The mother answered wisely enough, “Father, I will never give my daughter cause to curse me after I am dead, by obliging her to wedlock where she does not fancy.”  Whereupon the priest replied, “What! do you not stand more in awe of a temporal than an eternal curse?” and, working upon the feelings of the girl, who began to tremble and to weep, extorted from her a promise to accept the “feigned husband.”  He adds, “Notwithstanding this, some obstinate mothers have rather chosen to die unconfessed, than to concern themselves with the marriage of their daughters.”  Being obliged to attend Communion at Easter, these temporary couples would part on the first day of Lent; obtain absolution and, a week afterwards, either cohabit once more or find otherpartners.  The “indiscreet method of courtship,” popularly known as “bundling,” here existed, and was found by Caillie amongst the southern Moors:  “When everybody is at rest, the man creeps into his intended’s tent, and remains with her till daybreak.”

An energetic attempt was made to abolish polygamy, which, instead of diminishing population as some sciolists pretend, caused the country to swarm like maritime China.  Father Carli, who also dilates upon the evil practice of the sexes living together on trial, ca. didly owns that his main difficulty lay in “bringing the multitude to keep to one wife, they being wholly averse to that law.”  Yet old travellers declare that when the missionaries succeeded, the people “lived so Christian-like and lovingly together, that the wife would suffer herself to be cut to pieces rather than deceive her husband.”  Merolla, indeed, enlarges on the constancy of women, whether white or black, when lawfully married to their mates; and praises them for living together in all