In some parts of the world the child-wife does not belong to her child-husband. "Among the Reddies, of India," Letourneau informs us, "a girl from sixteen to twenty years of age is married to a boy of five or six. The wife then becomes the real wife of the boy's uncle, or cousin, or of the father of the reputed husband. But the latter is considered to be the legal father of the children of his pretended wife." So it is only when the boy has grown up that he receives his wife, and he, in turn, acts as his relative before him (100. 354). Temple cites the following curious custom in his tales of the Panjâb (542. I. xviii.):-- "When Raja Vasali has won a bride from Raja Sirkap, he is given a new-born infant and a mango-tree, which is to flower in twelve years, and when it flowers, the girl is to be his wife." The age prescribed by ancient Hindu custom (for the Brahman, Tshetria, and Vysia classes) is six to eight years for the girl, and the belief prevailed that if a girl were to attain her puberty before being married, her parents and brothers go to hell, as it was their duty to have got her married before that period (317. 56). Father Sangermano, writing of Burma a hundred years ago, notices the "habit of the Burmese to engage their daughters while young, in real or fictitious marriages, in order to save them from the hands of the king's ministers, custom having established a rule, which is rarely if ever violated, that no married woman can be seized, even for the king himself" (234. xlii.). The child-marriages of India have been a fruitful theme for discussion, as well as the enforced widowhood consequent upon the death of the husband. Among the most interesting literature on the subject are the "Papers relating to Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood in India" (317), Schlagintweit (142), etc. The evils connected with the child-marriages of India are forcibly brought out by Mrs. Steel in several of the short stories in her _From the Five Rivers_ (1893), and by Richard Garbe in his beautiful little novel _The Redemption of the Brahman_(1894).