wait until the second beer-drinking, six months or a year later. At this second ceremony dancing takes place on the first night, and beer is drunk the next day. Before sunset on the first day the widow is again shaven, and the mother of the deceased informs her that she is now free to marry again. That night “she has to sleep with a man paid by her {222} relations.” He is not her permanent husband; his services are merely required as a preliminary to her marriage. According to the account from which I am quoting it would appear that she may marry after mourning two or three months, but not without the same previous ritual coition, else “her second husband would die, should she have committed adultery.” A widower, on the other hand, “mourns five or six months and is then given medicine, after which he may marry again, and without which, should he marry, his new wife would die.”[222.1] There are some difficulties here. It seems clear that until the mourning is over the widows cannot marry again, and the length of mourning is decided by the relatives of the deceased; it is closed with the beer-drinking. When it is over, the widows select their husbands from among the kindred of the deceased; he who marries the chief wife is the heir. A widow cannot marry outside this limited circle, unless she, or her new husband, be prepared to repay her bride-price, and often more. Customs doubtless differ, but this is the usual course. It is curious too that the second husband of a widow should die, if he married her without the previous coition by another man, only if she had committed adultery, whereas the woman marrying a widower will die in any case if he have not had medicine. It is probable that there has been some misunderstanding of the informants and that the second husband runs the risk of death in any case by wedding a widow who has not undergone the regular preliminary.[222.2] The probability is confirmed by the practice of the Yaos, a neighbouring tribe, among whom the second husband {223} pays a man to pass a night with the widow before he takes her.[223.1] A further example may be given from a wholly different cultural area. Among the Kamtchadals no one would be willing to marry a widow “unless her sins have been previously taken away by the highest degree of familiarity granted to anyone who wishes to render her this service.” The writer to whom we are indebted for the information reported in the eighteenth century that the natives imagined that this expiation might cause the expiator to die like the defunct husband, so that the poor women would remain widows but for the assistance of the Russian soldiers, who were not afraid of exposing themselves to a danger so equivocal.[223.2]