Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/275

 Corresp07idence. 239

said to haunt her house. Twelve ghost-layers came and laid the ghost at midnight under the hearthstone, (p. 14.)

Sayings :

" He's never happy unless he's miserable," speaking of a grumbling person.

"A nimble penny is worth a slow sixpence."

" He should have coughed more before he did it."

" Within a squirrel's jump."

" The furder oft" the better looked upon."

Argument against a parish banquet: — "Them as comes won't remember it ; them as don't won't forget it."

" As cold as mutton," said of weather.

"The dog for the man, the cat for the woman," referring to respective duties.

"As sure as God's in Gloucestershire," was a common proverb, probably arising from the number of monasteries existing in this county, (p. 8.)

Marg.\ret Burne. Loynton Hall, Newport, Shropshire.

Playing the Wer-Beast.

(Vol. xxi., pp. 371-4).

Since I wrote the account of main hantu niusang which was published in Folk-Lore, Mr. R. J. Wilkinson's pamphlet on Malay Amusements ^ has appeared. It contains a brief description of the same thing, and gives the verses sung in the similar goat game. Besides variants I mentioned, Mr. Wilkinson speaks (p. 11) of a main hantu rusa (deer), at the present time nothing more than ordinary hide-and-seek, but said by Malays to have originated in the possession by the spirit of a slaughtered deer of a party of hunters who omitted to propitiate it in the usual way (p. i). Compare with this the Singhie Dyak who at one time was " running about the woods in a state of nudity, making the noises and imitating the habits of a deer, of the fiesh of which animal he was supposed to have eaten."- Some such madness is one of the penalties supposed to be incurred by Dyaks who eat forbidden flesh. ^

"^ Low, in Ling Roth, Natives of Sara-wak etc., vol. i., p. 296. ^ S. St. John, Life in the Forests of the Far East, vol. i., p. 72, and Hose in Ling Roth, op. cit., vol. i., p. 389.
 * F.M.S. Government Press, Kuala Lumpur.