The whole life of these village folk is one piece of unreal acting.

They are continually asking themselves whether they are incurring any of the penalties entailed by infraction of the long table of prohibitions, and whether they are living up to the foreign garments they wear.
Their faces have, for the most part, an expression of sullen discontent, they move about silently and joylessly, rebels in heart to the restrictive code on them, but which they fear to cast off, partly from a vague apprehension of possible secular results, and partly because they suppose they will cease to be good Christians if they do so.

They have good ground for their dissatisfaction.

At the time when I visited the villages I have specially in my eye, it was punishable by fine and imprisonment to wear native clothing, punishable by fine and imprisonment to wear long hair or a garland of flowers; punishable by fine or imprisonment to wrestle or to play at ball; punishable by fine and imprisonment to build a native-fashioned house; punishable not to wear shirt and trousers, and in certain localities coat and shoes also; and, in addition to laws enforcing a strictly puritanical observation of the Sabbath, it was punishable by fine and imprisonment to bathe on Sundays.

In some other places bathing on Sunday was punishable by flogging; and to my knowledge women have been flogged for no other offense.