Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/465

Rh grew up, and wriggled into the Rul chawm Kua, (i.e. Feed snake hole), and the people of all villages used to feed it. After a time it was not content with goats and pigs, but demanded children. One day a Poi, who was staying in the house of an old couple, asked them why they were crying, and they told him it was the day for giving the snake a child. "I will kill it," he said, and, being given a goat, he killed it, and wrapped its flesh round his dao and forearm, and offered it to the snake, which swallowed it right up to the elbow; then with a quick turn of his wrist he disembowelled the monster. The place where this took place is on the Aijal Falam road, some 40 miles from Aijal, and the hole is still there "to witness if I lie.""

The following is a specimen of a tale without an object:—"Nu-hlu-pi took the form of a tree, and below the road her red flowers bloomed continually. When the people tried to pluck them, she used to play some trick on them. Thlang-pa-saisira was about to pick one, when she seized him and flew away with him to the north, and made him perch on a branch of a tree. Then Nu-hlu-pi said,—"What do you want most?" "Tumtelek flowers from Burma," he replied. Then she flew off to fetch them, and he came down and met an old man. "Grand-daddy, if you meet Nu-hlu-pi, and she asks you, have you seen Thlang-pa-saisira?, please say,—"I have not seen him."" The old man said,—"Are you afraid? Strip off my skin, and put it on." So he stripped it off, and put it on. Then Nu-hlu-pi came seeking for him, and she saw him below the road, (i.e. she saw the old man in Thlang-pa-saisira's skin), and squeezed him hard,—"You are uncommonly like Thlang-pa-saisira," she said, but he replied,—"I am not Thlang-pa-saisira. You will squeeze my collar-bone in two." "You are very like him," she said, and left him. Then Thlang-pa-saisira began clucking to call the fowls beneath the man with the crowd of children, (the Lushai equivalent of the