Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/168

162 When they saw a hail-cloud approaching they made a signal, whereupon the farmers turned out and sacrificed lambs or fowls. They believed that when the clouds had tasted the blood they would turn aside and go somewhere else. ''Hoc rides? accipe quod rideas magis.'' If any man was too poor to afford a lamb or a fowl, he pricked his finger with a sharp instrument, and offered his own blood to the clouds; and the hail, we are told, turned aside from his fields quite as readily as from those where it had been propitiated with the blood of victims. If the vines and crops suffered from a hail-storm, the watchmen were brought before the magistrates and punished for neglect of duty. Apparently, it formed part of their duty not only to signal the approach of a storm, but actively to assist in averting it, for Plutarch speaks of the mole’s blood and bloody rags by which they sought to turn the storm away. This custom of civilised Greece has its analogue among the wild tribes that lurk in the dense jungles of the Malay Peninsula. Thunder is greatly dreaded by these savages. Accordingly, “when it thunders the women cut their legs with knives till the blood flows, and then, catching the drops in a piece of bamboo, they cast them aloft towards the sky, to propitiate the angry deities.” The Aztecs, also, had sorcerers, whose special business it was to turn aside the hail-storms from the maize crops and direct them to waste lands. A Roman way of averting hail was to hold up a looking-glass to the dark cloud; seeing itself in the glass, the cloud, it was believed, would pass by. A tortoise laid on its back on the field, or the skin of a crocodile, hyæna, or seal