The free choice of both woman and man is opposed to the theory of our present marriage ceremony, where permission or authority to marry is only necessary for the woman, the man being able to do as he pleases. This is now regarded as a sign of women’s early subjection to the authority of men and their subordinate place in the household. But it does not follow that this was the relative position of men and women when a ceremony was first found needful and instituted. I am inclined to think it must have been, rather, the importance attached to the woman’s act of ratification, in the presence of witnesses, of her formal promise to bear children to a particular man. Marriage would then consist of contracts between two parties for the purpose of, and which actually resulted in, the birth of children; of concubinage, or the wife consenting to children being born to her husband by another woman in her stead, if she herself failed in this respect (such children being hers and her husband’s jointly); of marriage without ceremony or set purpose, resulting from young people being thrown together at feast times, gathering in of harvests, &c., which might or might not result in the birth of children. These conditions of the marriage rite are at variance with what we know of the Aryan marriage generally and its results; and that they flow from the customs preserved in the game under consideration is further proof of the origin of the game from a marriage rite of the pre-Celtic people of these islands. The “kissing together” of the married couple is the token to the witnesses of their mutual consent to the contract. Attention has already been directed to the fact that parts of the formula preserved in this game are also found in other games, and it may possibly be assumed therefrom that the same origin must be given to these games as to “Sally Water.” The objection to such a conclusion is mainly that it is impossible to decide to which game the popular marriage formula originally belonged, and from which it has been borrowed by the other games. Seeing how exactly it fits the circumstances of “Sally Water,” it might not be too much to suggest that it rightly belongs to this game. Another point to be noted is that the tune to which the words of the marriage formula are sung is always the same, irrespective of that to which the previous verses are sung, and this rule obtains in all those games in which this formula appears—a further proof of the antiquity of the formula as an outcome of the early marriage ceremony. [7] Redruth version— Fly for the east, fly for the west, Fly for the very one you love best. Sally Sober A game among girls [undescribed].—Dickinson’s _Cumberland Glossary_ (_Supplement_). Salmon Fishers