Marriage was a matter of purchase and sale; wives were sold, sometimes, by husbands, and daughters were invariably sold by fathers. The marriage ceremony consisted in painting the girl in a certain fashion for several days before she was delivered to her husband. A new canoe was very often the price of a girl. It is a curious fact, illustrative of Yahgan society, that a father sometimes sold his girls to men whom he did not really like. A man of influence could have any girl he wished; her father would rather let the transfer be made than offend the man of influence, and that, too, when the influential fellow already had a wife or two. But there were forms and methods in the marriage negotiations that were dear to the Yahgan heart. The dicker for a wife as conducted amounted to what would be among civilized people at once an intrigue and the negotiating of a treaty. It was because of this delicacy of feeling among the Yahgans that the brutal white whalers and seal hunters that came to the region were unable to do any serious damage to this race previous to the year 1870. The Yahgan would not tolerate the rude lasciviousness of the white seamen, and until taught that it was wicked, stood up, man fashion, and fought in defence of his wives and daughters. In religion the Yahgans were oddities, though not unique. They knew nothing of God, and had no word expressive of such an idea. To the great grief of the missionaries, there was nothing in the Yahgan language by which the idea of an everlasting, all-powerful God who must be obeyed could be adequately conveyed to Yahgan listeners, nor had they any word for or thought of a future life. But the Yahgan's mind was not wholly material. He believed in spirits or supernatural and invisible beings, but these were invariably terrible. There was a spirit of the forest, and another of the water, and another of the kelp. Crouching over his tiny fire by night, the Yahgan heard weird voices among the waving trees on the mountain side above him, he felt the breath that scattered the embers of his hearth, he saw the deluge that drowned out even his brightest flames, and all these were manifestations of a power that was ill-defined in his mind, but nevertheless real. The Yahgan mother in this fearsome presence clasped her babe more closely to her bosom, not that it was cold, but to save it from some grasping hand that was always expected, but never came. In the eddying waters of the tide rip was a boisterous devil that strove at one moment to throw the canoe into the air, and the next to suck it down to the unknown region below, while in the beds of kelp lurked a silent spirit that with soft and slimy touch grasped the bottom of the canoe, and held it fast until at times the frantic occupants leaped overboard and disappeared.