Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/390

 352 cannot converse with one another, even to ask Bucket to get me such small every-day things as wood or water, their language being so entirely different. . . ..

You ask is female infanticide prevalent here? Owing to strict police supervision it is supposed to be suppressed, but one rarely sees a female child. Further north though, where the natives are cannibals, when the babies are not eaten they are choked with the sand (this from more than one authority). There the female children are of small account; for example, the pingins are used only for male children. . . ..

Mr. Mackay, of the Eastern Telegraph Extension Company, when here showed me on both his arms the two gashes on each, which were made by the natives when he went to a man-making ceremony here. The scars, two to two and a half inches long, were made by a piece of glass by the women, who dipped bits of glass in the blood from the wounds, and then wanted to rub sand or ashes into the cut, so as to raise it above surrounding flesh. A Mr. Gaunt, who has travelled much in bush-lands of Australia, before selling out of the pearling, brought us a lot of cowries of all sorts and colours, together with some exquisite coral specimens in form of kylies, very rare I believe, and found as far as is known on only one reef in the north-west. We experienced the other day what is known as a Willy-willy (a dry wdlly- willy). I call it a six hours' sand-storm. We had everywhere closed up as tightly as possible, but the sand worked in through every crevice, and we could have shovelled it from the floor. Our water was like mud, the only drink that we had. The temperature dropped ten or twelve degrees in about an hour, so that for a few hours at least the temperature stood below 90 degrees. At 85 degrees we were shivering! Now it is hotter than ever.

I learn from Josepha amongst her little sayings that Mary tells her, that the moon eats kangaroos, the evening star 'possum.