Among the gods, therefore, children were rejected or accepted without ceremony, and with such an attitude of rejection or acceptance depicted as the normal condition among the deities, it may easily be imagined what was the attitude of the ordinary beings who modelled their conduct on that of the deities. It is told of the first Emperor Jimmu, that, meeting a group of seven maidens, he invited one of them to become a wife of his, and on her acceptance the sovereign passed the night at her house. This constituted the only marriage ceremony that the times knew. As far as the woman was concerned, all that the new condition meant was that she was liable to receive a visit at any time from her new lord and master, but on his side there was no obligation, no duty of fidelity, and he was free to form as many similar unions as fancy dictated. The children were brought up by the mother and one household of a man might be in absolute ignorance of another.[102] Mistress, wife, and concubine were on the same footing and could be discarded at any moment. When the Deity of Eight Thousand Spears, attired in his favourite courting costume, is about to go forth and search for a “better wife” he boldly announces that: When I take and attire myself so Carefully in my august garments green As the kingfisher— It is with the intention of finding another mate. To this the Chief Empress, Her Augustness the Forward Princess, to whom the frank statement is made, plaintively replies: “Thou ... indeed, being a man, probably hast on the various island-headlands that thou seest and on every beach-headland that thou lookest on, a wife like the young herbs. But I, alas! being a woman have no man except thee; I have no spouse except thee!”[103] What became of the children in the cases of conjugal separation does not appear, a statement that is made by no less a Japanese authority than Chamberlain.[104] In only one instance is there any reference made to the fate of a child that had been deserted, but this is an unusual case, where the father had violated the rules of the parturition house, with the result that the mother disappears, leaving the father to take care of the child. He pledged himself to look after it until the day of his death but the sister of the child’s mother was first invoked to act as nurse.