CHAPTER 6.
Hindoo Marriages.
Certain it is that no Hindoo will have a marriage in his family during the four months of the rainy season; for among eighty millions of souls[1] not one doubts that the Great Preserver of the universe is, during these four months, down on a visit to Raja Bali, and, consequently, unable to bless the contract with his presence.[2] Marriage is a sacred duty among Hindoos, a duty which every parent must perform for his children, otherwise they owe him no reverence.

A family with a daughter unmarried after the age of puberty is considered to labour under the displeasure of the gods; and no member of the other sex considers himself _respectable_ after the age of puberty till he is married.

It is the duty of his parent or elder brothers to have him suitably married; and, if they do not do so, he reproaches them with his _degraded condition_.

The same feeling, in a degree, pervades all the Muhammadan community; and nothing appears so strange to them as the apparent indifference of old bachelors among us to their _sad condition_.
Marriage, with all its ceremonies, its rights, and its duties, fills their imagination from infancy to age; and I do not believe there is a country upon earth in which a larger portion of the wealth of the community is spent in the ceremonies, or where the rights are better secured, or the duties better enforced, notwithstanding all the disadvantages of the laws of polygamy.

Not one man in ten can afford to maintain more than one wife, and not one in ten of those who can afford it will venture upon 'a sea of troubles' in taking a second, if he has a child by the first.