younger men in exchange for their sisters or near relatives, if such are
at their disposal.

[Note 77: "Practised by the American Indians."--Catlin, vol. i. p. 216.

"The early life of a young woman at all celebrated for beauty is generally
one continued series of captivity to different masters, of ghastly wounds,
of wanderings in strange families, of rapid flights, of bad treatment from
other females amongst whom she is brought a stranger by her captor; and
rarely do you see a form of unusual grace and elegance, but it is marked
and scarred by the furrows of old wounds; and many a female thus wanders
several hundred miles from the home of her infancy, being carried off
successively to distant and more distant points."]

Women are often sadly ill-treated by their husbands or friends, in
addition to the dreadful life of drudgery, and privation, and hardship
they always have to undergo; they are frequently beaten about the head,
with waddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for
the most trivial offences. No one takes the part of the weak or the
injured, or ever attempts to interfere with the infliction of such severe
punishments.

Few women will be found, upon examination, to be free from frightful
scars upon the head, or the marks of spear-wounds about the body. I have
seen a young woman, who, from the number of these marks, appeared to have
been almost riddled with spear wounds. Upon this point Captain Grey
remarks, vol. ii. p. 249.

The menses commence to flow among the native females at an earlier age
than among Europeans, frequently beginning at about twelve; they are also