for her to let the guests wait as long as possible, and not to appear until after considerable coaxing by her mother.  When a Votyak bridegroom comes after the bride on the wedding-day she is denied to him three times.  After that she is searched for, dragged from her hiding-place, and her face covered with a cloth, while she screams and struggles.  Then she is carried to the yard, placed on a blanket with her face down, and the bridegroom belabors her with a stick on a pillow which has been tied on her back.  After that she becomes obedient and amiable.  A Mordvin bride must try to escape from the wagon on the way to the church.  In Old Finland the bride was barricaded in her house even after the wedding, and the Island Swedes have the same custom.  This burlesque of bridal resistance after marriage occurs also among the wild tribes of India.  “After remaining with her husband for ten days only,” writes Dalton (192), “it is the correct thing for the wife to run away from him, and tell all her friends that she loves him not and will see him no more.”  The husband’s duty is to seek her eagerly.

“I have seen a young wife thus found and claimed, and borne away, screeching and struggling in the arms of her husband, from the midst of a crowded bazaar.  No one interferes on these occasions.”

More than enough has now been said to prove that in cases of sham capture the girls simply follow their village customs blindly.  Left to themselves they might act very differently, but as it is, all the girls in each district must do the same thing, however silly.  About the real feelings of the girls these comedies tell us nothing whatever.  With coyness—­that is, a woman’s concealment of her feelings toward a man she likes—­these actions have no more to do than the man in the moon has with anthropology.  Least of all do they tell us anything about love, for the girls must all act alike, whether they favor a man or not.  Regarding the absence of love we have, moreover, the direct testimony of Dr. F. Kreutzwald (Schroeder, 233).  That marriages are made in heaven is, he declares, true in a certain sense, so far as the Esthonians are concerned; for “the parties concerned usually play a passive role....  Love is not one of the requisites, it is an unknown phenomenon.”  Utilitarianism, he adds, is the basis of their marriages.  The suitor tries to ascertain if the girl he wants is a good worker; to find this out he may even watch her secretly while she is spinning, thrashing, or combing flax.

“Most of the men proceed at random, and it is not unusual for a suitor who has been refused in one place and another to proceed at once to a third or fourth....  Many a bridegroom sees his bride for the first time at the ceremony of the priestly betrothal, and he cannot therefore be blamed for asking:  ‘Which of these girls is my bride?’”

GREEK AND ROMAN MERCENARY COYNESS