“A good marriage for you would have bankrupted us. We do not have an extra bay mule or gold coin to our name and times are only getting worse.” A girl’s dowry payments ruined families like ours, the ones who made only enough to get by. How many times had I heard the old sayings: “Blessed is the door out of which goes a dead daughter, and the older and uglier she is the greater the comfort” or “I have five children. One boy and four burdens.”
