When a Kadir youth's thoughts turn towards matrimony, he is said to go to the village of his bride-elect, and give her a dowry by working there for a year. On the wedding day a feast of rice, sheep, fowls, and other luxuries is given by the parents of the bridegroom, to which the Kadir community is invited. The bride and bridegroom stand beneath a pandal (arch) decorated with flowers, which is erected outside the home of the bridegroom, while men and women dance separately to the music of drum and fife. The bridegroom's mother or sister ties the tali (marriage badge) of gold or silver round the bride's neck, and her father puts a turban on the head of the bridegroom. The contracting parties link together the little fingers of their right hands as a token of their union, and walk in procession round the pandal. Then, sitting on a reed mat of Kadir manufacture, they exchange betel. The marriage tie can be dissolved for incompatibility of temper, disobedience on the part of the wife, adultery, etc., without appeal to any higher authority than a council of elders, who pronounce judgment on the evidence. As an illustration of the manner in which such a council of hill-men disposes of cases, Mr. Bensley cites the case of a man who was made to carry forty basket loads of sand to the house of the person against whom he had offended. He points out how absolute is the control exercised by the council. Disobedience would be followed by excommunication, and this would mean being turned out into the jungle, to obtain a living in the best way one could. By one Kadir informant I was assured, as he squatted on the floor of my bungalow at "question time," that it is essential that a wife should be a good cook, in accordance with a maxim that the way to the heart is through the mouth. How many men in civilised western society, who suffer from marrying a wife wholly incompetent, like the first Mrs. David Copperfield, to conduct the housekeeping, might well be envious of the system of marriage as a civil contract to be sealed or unloosed according to the cookery results! Polygyny is indulged in by the Kadirs, who agree with Benedick that "the world must be peopled," and hold more especially that the numerical strength of their own tribe must be maintained. The plurality of wives seems to be mainly with the desire for offspring, and the father-in-law of one of the forest-guards informed me that he had four wives living. The first two wives producing no offspring, he married a third, who bore him a solitary male child. Considering the result to be an insufficient contribution to the tribe, he married a fourth, who, more prolific than her colleagues, gave birth to three girls and a boy, with which he remained content. In the code of polygynous etiquette, the first wife takes precedence over the others, and each wife has her own cooking utensils.