Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/353

 Rh characteristic examples of division into eight. The serpent's skin (No. 5) is an example of the more unusual division into sixteen, and the strawberry leaf (No. 16) of the still more unusual division into twelve. The serpent (No. 20) shows a continuous pattern covering the whole surface of the egg, and No. 26 a discontinuous pattern consisting of a number of little hoes dotted over the surface of the egg.

It is not surprising to find that in different villages, or even at times in the same village, the same subject is treated in different ways. For example, Nos. 1 and 2 both represent fir needles, Nos. 18, 19, and perhaps 21, the stag-horn beetle, Nos. 25 and 35 a monastery, Nos. 6 and 23 a goose's foot, Nos. 17 and 39 the canines of a pig, and Nos. 15, 16, and 38 strawberry leaves.

It is perhaps less to be expected that the same design should bear a variety of different names, but in practice the names of the designs are somewhat loosely attached. On talking with a girl highly skilled in the preparation of eggs, I found her to be quite vague as to the names of quite twenty per cent, at least of her own eggs. She said, for instance, that No. 9 might equally well be a cock's comb or the tail of a turkey. No. 21, called by her a spider, is called by Madame Panaitescu a staghorn beetle. No. 34 is called by Tzigara Samurcaş pieces of bread, and by Madame Panaitescu a cock; with the apices of the triangles rounded off a little, the design becomes fish in a (basketwork) net (peştele in coteț). No. 35, the monastery, could with the most insignificant changes stand for a violet (micşunele), the nest of the ortolan (cuibul crângului, Emberyza hortulana), or the leaf of Acer campestre (frunsă jugastrului). It might have been thought that No. 33, the labyrinth, was a design to which the imaginative might have been able to affix a variety of names, but I have found the design in many parts of Roumania, and always with the same name.

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