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is much feasting and dancing, but little ceremony.  The turning-point of the affair is when the bride partakes of the food cooked in her husband's house, and thereby acknowledges herself of his "keeley," or clan; for the Hos are thus divided, and may not take to wife a girl of their own keeley.  The Ho husband has to pay a high price for his wife, and it is certain that he highly appreciates her; although he is not known to apply to her, or have for her, any term of endearment more demonstrative than "my old woman;" yet by no civilized races are wives treated with greater kindness and consideration than by the untutored Ho.  The whole of the domestic arrangements are under the wife's exclusive management, and she is consulted on all occasions.  She always cooks for her husband, and when the dinner is ready they sit down and eat it together like Christians.

The Hos, like the Moondahs and Oraons, burn their dead.  The charred bones found amongst the ashes are carefully collected and placed in an earthen vessel, which is for a time hung up to the eaves of the house.  This is done with ceremonial mourning and sacrifice.  The actual interment of these remains takes place at any subsequent time which may be fixed; coins and food, and all the clothes and ornaments in possession of deceased at the time of his death, or which he had ever worn, being buried with the earthen vase.  This custom is so strictly observed, that respectable Hos ascribe it as a reason for not wearing expensive clothes, though for the sake of display they keep a supply by them.  Over the grave is placed a flat stone, sometimes so large that one marvels how they could, without machinery, have moved it; but great men must have great monuments, and sometimes a man, doubtful as to whether his posterity will properly appreciate him, or possess the same power and influence that he wields, provides himself the stone that he desires his ashes should repose under.

In addition to the gravestone, a stone pillar is set up to the memory of the deceased outside the village.  It is fixed in an earthen plinth, on which, in the shade of the pillar, the spirit of the deceased is supposed to rest.  It may be mentioned here that they have a superstition regarding a shadow for which they cannot themselves account, but which may bear some relation to their worship of the sun.  They will not touch food on which a man's shadow has fallen.

At all festivals and ceremonies, deep potations of the rice beer called "Eeley" are freely indulged in by both sexes.  Inspirited by this beverage, the young men and girls dance together all day and half the night, but the dances are perfectly correct, and whenever these meetings have led to improprieties, it is always attributed to a too free indulgence in "Eeley."  As a rule, the men are reserved and highly decorous in their treatment of the women, and the girls, though totally free from the prudery that secludes altogether, or averts the head of a Hindoo or Mahomedan maiden when seen by a man, have a modest demeanour and much feminine grace.