In all cases, and among all the tribes, the acceptance on the part of the lady of the offerings of the love-lorn swain means acceptance of himself as a husband.
“What would happen,” I asked several members—men and women—of the Taiyal tribe, “if an engagement were broken? Would the young lady return the presents?”
“Break an engagement?” They all looked puzzled. “That would mean breaking a promise that had been made, would it not? But that is not the custom.” The voice of the priestess, who was the spokeswoman of the group, was shocked.
“It is a thing not unheard of in some parts of the world,” I explained.
“I speak not of savages,”[79] the old woman disdainfully replied.
Almost immediately after the acceptance of the suitor a priestess is consulted, and she, in turn, consults the bird-omen—for in Formosa to-day it is considered quite as true as it was in Greece, in the days of Hesiod, that—
“Lucky and bless’d is he who, knowing all these things,
Toils in the fields, blameless before the Immortals,
Knowing in birds and not over-stepping tabus.”[80]