of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, and the child, and sent her away." The simplicity of this method has not survived the centuries. Here is a re port of a Jewish divorce, which appeared in a London paper in 1778 : " On Thursday last the Jew priest of the Hambro' syna gogue in Fenchurch Street was divorced from his priestess. The ceremony observed on this occasion was very solemn : there were four Jew Rabbins, two attended each party. After the parties had stated their complaints and objections to each other, they asked the priestess if she was willing to part from her husband? she replied, ' Yes'; the priest then spit in her face, to show his contempt for her; she, in return, did the same; the priest threw the bill of divorce ment at the priestess; she, with open arms and hands expanded, received it with such avidity as convinced the whole assembly with what a satisfaction she was willing to sepa rate from her husband. That done, they again spit in each other's face and exclaimed, ' Cursed be they who ever wish to bring us two together again! '" Among the mystifying proverbs of an cient times is one which reads thus : " Pro voke me not too much, that I throw water into the fire." According to the old writer John Marbeck, this was based on a primitive custom of divorce among the Chaldeans. Says he : " The daye when anie person should be married, the Priest came into the house to light new fire, the which never ought to be put out untill the houre of death. And if perchaunce, during the lyfe of the husband and the wife, they should find the fire dead and put out, the marriage betweene them was dead and vndone. Yea, though they had bene forty years married. And of this occasion came the proverb, which of many is read, and of few vnderstood." In early Russian times divorce was brought about in this manner. The couple who wished to be separated, simply pro
ceeded to a public square, and each taking hold of one of the ends of a strip of brittle muslin, they pulled it apart in the presence of their townspeople, by this act signifying a mutual desire to part company. It is not only in Japan that a husband may divorce his wife if she should be too talkative. The Chinese courts allow divorce for loquacity, inattention to parents-in-law, thievishness, ill-temper, lasciviousness, and barrenness. The man who puts away his wife for any other cause is punished with eighty blows. The ancient Chinese were much more liberal in their divorce laws. It is recorded in one of their old books that "a wife was turned away if she allowed the house to be full of smoke, or if she frightened the dog with her disagreeable noise; " by which it would appear that those old rateaters thought more of their dogs than they did of their wives. Probably the dogs se cured for them their favorite rodentian fare. In Morocco a man may leave his wife on the slightest provocation, and marry again. De Churcher writes : " One of the servants here is reported to have had nineteen wives already, though he is still only middle aged." Another writer says that among the Moors it is considered " low " for a couple to live too long together, and the leaders of fashion are those who have been the oftenest divorced. Pollak tells us that in Persia, a "Sighe " wife is taken in marriage for a le gally stipulated period, which may be of any length from one hour to ninety-nine years. In Greenland, husband and wife are allowed to separate after living together for six months. The Maldivians are so fond of matrimonial change that cases are frequent where a man marries and divorces the same woman three or four times. The old Dutch East India rulers of the Cape maintained no favorable disposition towards divorce, as the following extract will show. It is by Thunberg, who visited the Cape in 1774. "The wife of one Pardyn, who had been a soldier seventeen
