shoes, and a marriage crown of date-palm leaves. He has the silver ornaments usually worn by women on his neck, as the _khang-wāri_ or silver ring and the _hamel_ or necklace of rupees. In order to avert the evil eye he carries a dagger or nut-cracker, and a smudge of lampblack is made on his forehead to disfigure him and thus avert the evil eye, which, it is thought, would otherwise be too probably attracted by his exquisitely beautiful appearance in his wedding garments.”(700) These examples render it highly probable that, like the dagger or nut-cracker which he holds in his hand, the woman’s ornaments which he wears are intended to protect the bridegroom against demons or the evil eye at this critical moment of his life, the protection apparently consisting in a disguise which enables him to elude the unwelcome attentions of malignant beings.(701) (M232) A similar explanation probably accounts for the similar exchange of costume between other persons than the bride and bridegroom at marriage. For example, after a Bharia wedding, “the girl’s mother gets the dress of the boy’s father and puts it on, together with a false beard and moustaches, and dances holding a wooden ladle in one hand and a packet of ashes in the other. Every time she approaches the bridegroom’s father on her rounds she spills some of the ashes over him and occasionally gives him a crack on the head with her ladle, these actions being accompanied by bursts of laughter from the party and frenzied playing by the musicians. When the party reach the bridegroom’s house on their return, his mother and the other women come out, and burn a little mustard and human hair in a lamp, the unpleasant smell emitted by these articles being considered potent to drive away evil spirits.”(702) Again, after a Khangar wedding the father of the bridegroom, dressed in women’s clothes, dances with the mother of the bride, while the two throw turmeric mixed with water on each other.(703) Similarly after a wedding of the Bharbhunjas, another Hindustani caste of the Central Provinces, the bridegroom’s father dances before the family in women’s clothes which have been supplied by the bride’s father.(704) Such disguises and dances may be intended either to protect the disguised dancer himself against the evil eye or perhaps rather to guard the principal personages of the ceremony, the bride and bridegroom, by diverting the attention of demons from them to the guiser.(705) However, when at marriage the bride alone assumes the costume and appearance of the other sex, the motive for the disguise may perhaps be a notion that on the principle of homoeopathic magic she thereby ensures the birth of a male heir. Similarly in Sweden there is a popular superstition that “on the night preceding her nuptials the bride should have a baby-boy to sleep with her, in which case her first-born will be a son”;(706) and among the Kabyles, when a bride dismounts from her mule at