There is another method of selling wives, with which the Chinese are acquainted, which can be adopted whenever the pressure of life at home becomes too hard to be borne. The husband and wife then start off on a begging expedition toward a region in which the crops have been good. In a bad year, there are thousands of such persons roaming about the country, picking up a scanty subsistence wherever they can. The man who wishes to sell his wife represents her as his sister, and declares that they are forced by hunger to part company. He reluctantly makes up his mind to sell her to some one who is in need of a wife, and who can get one more cheaply by this process than by any other. To this arrangement the woman tearfully assents, the money is paid to her "brother," and he departs, to be seen no more. After a few days or a few weeks in her new home, the newly married "sister" contrives to steal out in the evening with all of her own clothes and as many more as she can collect, and rejoins her "brother," setting out with him for "fresh woods and pastures new." With that keen instinct for analogy which characterizes the Chinese, they have invented for this proceeding the name of "falconing with a woman," likening it to the sport of a man who places his hawk on his wrist, and releases it when he sees game in sight, only that the bird may speedily return. It is a popular proverb, that "playing the falcon with a woman" implies a plot in which two persons are concerned. An inquirer is told that in some districts this practice of "falconing" is exceedingly common, for the supply of gullible persons who hope to buy a wife at a cheaper rate than usual never fails. The Chinese ridicule any one who seems to be infatuated with a bargain in which a woman is concerned, but it is not improbable that under similar circumstances they themselves would do the same. An old fellow living in the same village as the writer bought a woman under what he considered exceptionally profitable conditions, and lest she should escape, he anchored her in the yard fastened to a peg like a donkey. His neighbours laughed at him, and he at them, until the woman suddenly disappeared, an event which reduced him to a more sober view of the "five relations."