Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/411

Rh through a hole dug from under the foundation of the house, it was evidently done to protect the inmates from being haunted by the ghost of a suicide.

In Schwabien the body of a suicide was to be conveyed out under the doorstep or through a hole in the wall, with this explanation, that it was to prevent the dead from haunting the house.

In Greenland the dead are carried out through the window of the mud huts, or if it is in the summer time, through the back of the tent. The German traveller, Kohl, who has passed a long time amongst the North American Indians, tells of their great horror of all that reminds of death and burial. The Ojibway bury their dead quickly, they do not carry the corpse out of the door, but cut a hole in the wall of the house. As a rule the house is pulled down and another one built up; they are even so particular as not to light a new fire with a spark from the old one.

The same things are told of the people in Russia. One remarkable example from the Middle Ages may be mentioned. It refers evidently to an ordeal. The suspected person was to swallow a mouthful of consecrated bread. If he could not do so, he was to be dragged out alive under the doorstep and then put to death.

We then find the custom of not carrying the dead through the usual entrance to a house in the ancient Icelandic sagas, in comparatively modern Danish life, in judicial documents of the Middle Ages, in Swabia, in Greenland, among the North American Indians, the Slavonic races in Russia, and, I may add, among the Ostiaks, Siamese, Chinese, Hottentots, and Caribbees. Here and there the custom is observed with a full understanding of the reason, whilst in other places it is only a survival from ancient times. With the rise of civilization there has been a tendency to confine the