Next day, the bride and her bridemaids take a bath and perfume themselves, and the whole wedding party prepares for a new festival; and sometimes the rejoicings last for seven days, in the evenings of which there are always dancing and other amusements. If provisions fail, the men of the party spread through the neighbourhood, and kill what they want in the first flocks and herds they find. For this reason all the farmers, as soon as they hear that a wedding is to take place, drive away their beasts to a distance. It must be observed that the marriage is seldom considered as completely celebrated until the seventh day, and never until after the third. A husband always shuns the insulting epithet of the impatient man. Each day of temperance is dedicated to some particular person: the first to the father of the bride, the second to the mother, and so on. It is a strange custom in Darfur, that the wife, under no pretence whatever, is allowed to eat in the presence of her husband, or of any other man. If her husband happen to enter whilst she is eating, she instantly runs away, under penalty of universal contempt. I once enumerated to some Forians the various liberties that a husband can take with his wife, and asked why she should not also eat before him. “What you mention,” said they, “are very rational and proper acts, but for a woman to eat in the presence of a husband, to open her mouth and introduce food therein—ah, nothing can be more shameful!” As I have said, the wife remains in her father’s house until she has borne children; and if her husband propose to take her away, she may ground a demand of divorce thereon. In the early time of her marriage the wife never speaks of her husband by his name, but only as _he_; and if she be asked whom she means, she replies, _him_. When she has had a child she uses the expression,—The father of such a one. The husband has no family expenses until after a year of marriage, and at every repast all the best food is first offered to him. During the night also, as long as he sleeps in the house of his wife’s family, they bring him, in the course of the night, two or three supplemental meals; the first of which is called the undress meal; the second, the Tarna-jisi; and the third, the meal of dawn. These meals are served up to the husband by the bride herself. At the festival of the circumcision there are also great rejoicings. The operation is performed by a barber, and if the patient support it courageously the father promises him a heifer, a bull, or a slave, and all those who are present make him some gift. It is on this occasion that the boys scour the country in search of fowls.