Herself to be sold, but it
is remarked that this measure is seldom resorted to, and it sometimes
happens that a handsome wife is repeatedly turned to advantage by her
husband, in alluring the unwary into heavy damages.
The state of women is upon the whole very abject in Dahomy. Wives
approach their husbands with every mark of the humblest submission.
In presenting him even with a calabash containing his food, after she
has cooked it, she kneels and offers it with an averted look, it
being deemed too bold to stare him full in the face. By their
constantly practising genuflexion upon the bare ground, their knees
become in time almost as hard as their heels.
A mutinous wife or a vixen, sometimes the treasure and delight of an
Englishman; the enlivener of his fireside, and his safeguard from
ennui, is a phenomenon utterly unknown in Dahomy - that noble spirit,
which animates the happier dames in lands of liberty, being here,
alas! extinguished and destroyed.
In most nations a numerous progeny is considered a blessing, as being
likely to prop the declining years of their parents, but in Dahomy,
children are taken from their mothers at an early age, and
distributed in villages remote from the places of their nativity,
where they remain with but little chance of being ever seen, or at
least recognized by their parents afterwards.
