Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/479

Rh the ear-boring ceremonies are the most prominent and of some importance, as they have led to the use of ear-rings of fixed sorts as signs of occupation or caste and to ear-boring customs among the women of various nations in the East as general prophylactics against evil.

In matters affecting the daily life of the people, there are the use of ashes as a sign of both grief and saintship, and other conventional modes of expressing sorrow, such as the breaking of bracelets and jewellery, and the ceremonies gone through by the newly-made widow. There are also various conventional ways of conveying specific and general challenge to combat, claiming inheritance to land, blackening the face and other strange methods of inflicting disgrace. Of the daily and domestic customs which are hardly to be distingushed [sic] from ceremonial observances, there are many instances; e.g., the quaint methods of showing that the occupant of a house is "not at home," announcing a visitor, awakening a slumbering chief on an emergency, tying a knot to jog the memory, showing submission and making supplication. To show how the Legends reflect the people and their ways, there is an interesting use made for story-telling purposes of the inveterate habit of village children of teasing hedgehogs.

Allusions to popular beliefs and the frequent introduction of incidents turning on them must of course be looked for. These open up so many questions of interest and debatable points, that it would only be unduly swelling this already too long category of folklore subjects, to do more here than just merely run over the recognised titles of some of those that occur in the Legends and have not been above classified, in order to bring them to notice, and to show how very wide is the net that is cast by this collection of tales for gathering in the flotsam of Indian folklore. Many are the beliefs relating to the animal world and their forms, of which the following are samples:—the origin of twisted and back-curved horns of various deer; the sacred, celestial, and