Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/218

 202 Correspondence.

Charini Against the Evil Eye.

{Supra, p. 1x3.)

Miss L. M. Bunbury, who formerly lived for some time in Syria, has sent me two flat, round, blue discs of about the diameter of a sixpence, but much thicker, painted with a rude representation of an eye and pierced through the circumference to form beads, which she bought in the native bazaar at Haifa, in May, 1900. " It is not always easy," she writes, "to purchase them, as months may sometimes elapse before any are to be found for sale. They are used by natives as charms to nullify the effects of the Evil Eye ; a beautiful child, a valuable horse, or even a tree, is often adorned by one of these beads for this purpose. They are always blueT (Cf. Folklore, vol. xii., p. 268.) A Syrian woman, a native of Jerusalem, but living at Haifa, frequently (i 899-1 900) told Miss Bunbury that people with blue eyes, or with teeth wide apart, have the Evil Eye. This is also noticed by Mr. Frederick Sessions {Folklore, vol. ix., p. 10). The use of blue beads as a charm against it is then evidently a piece of sympathetic magic, while the ascription of the power (in an Eastern country) to blue- eyed people looks like a racial superstition.

Charlotte S. Burne.

The Calenig or Gift. {Supra, pp. 115, 174.)

It may perhaps be worthwhile recording in connection with the Calenig, that apples stuck with oats are, or less than half a century ago were, used to decorate the Lincolnshire Christmas-bough, which is sometimes called the kissing-bough, or mistletoe-bough, though in my young days mistletoe was too rare a plant to form any actual part of it.

At Bottesford, during my childhood, the maids, generally aided by their lovers, used to make such a bough to hang in the kitchen. The skeleton of it was formed of willow-rods, I think, and it was usually like a beehive in shape, though sometimes a hoop at the