Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/487

 Reviews. 445

do it on the sand I will be killed.' The elephant on hearing it thus said, ' Certainly, then, I'll dash him on the sand, and he will die.' He carried the rabbit to the sand, then lifting him overhead said, as he brought him down, ' Nga ! ' The rabbit as he touched the ground threw up the sand in the elephant's eyes, then ran away, saying, ' I have outwitted you.' " " The Bird and the Goblin " corresponds, in part, to " The Bird that made Milk," in McCall Theal's Kaffir Folklore, of which versions are also given by Jacottet, Torrend, and others. " The Rabbit and the Cock " is to be found in Junod's Chantes et Conies des Baronga as " Le Lievre et I'Hirondelle." M. Junod gives another version of the same story under the title of " Le Lievre et la Poule," and I have two Nyanja versions, " The Cock and the Swallow " (told at Blantyre by a boy whose home was on the Shire, near the Murchison Falls) and " The Cat and the Ntengu Bird," told by two boys in the West Shire district. Mrs. Dewar has given, not only the words of the songs which frequently occur in these stories (and are usually sung by the audience in chorus), but has also noted down the airs ; and these are perhaps the most interesting and valuable part of the book. These songs, probably owing to the practice just mentioned, are better known and remembered than the stories, as in "The Bush Fire" (p. 85) and several others. The music, so far as we can judge, does not differ essentially in character from the airs noted down, in the book already referred to, by M. Junod, who has come to the conclusion that the Baronga scale is the same as ours, though, owing no doubt to the imperfection of their instruments, a note is occasionally found to be too high or too low by the third or fourth part of a tone. Several airs, taken down on the Zambezi by M. Edouard Foa, have been successfully harmonised by M. Gaston Serpette (see appendix to La Traversee de VAfrique, Paris, 1900). M. Junod's remarks on this subject (^Chants et Cofites, pp. 21-34) are full of interest.

The stories collected by Miss Cronise among the Temne people, in the Sierra Leone Protectorate, are mostly of the familiar " Uncle Remus " type, though with important local characteristics of their own. It is interesting to note that " Cunnie Rabbit " (unlike the Kalulu of the East African stories) is not a rabbit at all, but a small antelope {Hyo??ioschus). The turtle or tortoise (here called Trorkey) is here, as elsewhere, the embodiment of