Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/273

 Correspondence. 233

a formal ceremony of abolition. My eldest brother went into a certain dark corner among the laurels, which no one but himself was ever allowed to enter, and returned with a bit of stick, which he held out to us, and solemnly broke, and we all spat upon the broken ends, exclaiming together, " Abolish, abolish, abolish ! " an indefinite number of times. He then took the broken stick back into the corner among the shrubs, and I suppose buried it ; but that we never knew for certain. After this ceremony the person or thing, so vividly real before, had no longer any existence for us, and we went on with our play, feeling freed from the en- cumbrance of what had for some reason become a bore and an oppression.

We had read (or at least I had) the Countess d'Aulnoy's Forty Merry Tales, and had heard of witches and of magic, but we certainly devised this ceremony entirely ourselves, and it had been in use for a long time before any one else knew anything about it. Its efficacy was very real to us, and I would not on any account have ventured into that corner among the laurels.

Charlotte S. Burne.

As an example of the symbolic gifts (b) enquired for by Colonel Hanna, I may note that for many years the grave of a young man, aged 22 or 23, in the Scarborough Cemetery has had placed on it once a week a supply of sweets, generally chocolates, of which, when alive, he was very fond. The sweets were at first taken to the grave by the grandmother and mother together, and, since the death of the grandmother, are still supplied by the mother. The sweets are taken away by children who know the practice.

E. Wright.

The Testing of a Sacrificial Victim.

The Greeks, like many other races, tested the suitability of an animal destined for sacrificial slaughter by drenching it with libations, and observing whether its body quivered and trembled, (Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, vol. iv., p. 186). Dr. Frazer