less trivial things than incompatibility of temper. If the husband took her back, and divorced her a second time, the woman was free to marry, but if the husband again wanted her, he had to pay her a marriage dowry as at her first marriage. Should he divorce her a third time, and again want her back, he would have to arrange for her to be married to — and divorced from — some one else first, when she was free to return to him. All this may sound very immoral to people in Europe, but one cannot help but admire the simplicity of the proceedings; and consider the amount of domestic infelicity it prevented. There is no public examination of the parties concerned; no publication of interesting details in newspapers; some little thought is given to the woman who may have been the mother of your children, and should she have slipped in the path of virtue, you do not shout it from the housetops; the marriage was a private arrangement between you, so is the divorce, and the reasons for the latter are your affair and no one else's.
I have touched upon divorce in some detail, as many re-marriages under all the conditions given above occurred, and some family records became a hopeless tangle to all but those immediately concerned. When the new Soudan Government comes to settle up claims to properties, they will be confronted with a collection of "succession" puzzles to solve, for one woman might be the proud mother of the legitimate heirs of three or four different people, and being, as the widow and mother of the heritor, entitled to a fixed proportion of the properties, you
