Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/371

 Collectanea. 349

siluroid fishes or, occasionally, goat's flesh, — may be laid on a woman for a time only, e.g. until she becomes pregnant, or until a child is born or weaned, or until both a boy and a girl have been born. When several children of a married couple have died in succession, a witch doctor will often recommend that the influ- ence of the fetish power ivumba shall be invoked, and a ceremony previously described"* is performed. This is followed by a feast in which the couple eat goat's and pig's flesh, fish, and eels, and certain foods will afterwards be tabued to the pair. The first child born afterwards will be named Wumba.

Childbirth tabu. — For a month the wife is not allowed to cook for a man, or to touch a man or anything belonging to him. Even her husband's food must not be cooked in the same house.

J. H. Weeks.


 * Vol. xxi., p. 464.

Scraps of English Folk-Lore, VI. ^

Cambridgeshire.

On February 14, 1911, I came across a piece of superstition in this parish which may be of interest. An old woman (aged seventy-two) told me that she had a "bloodstone," i.e. a stone to stop all bleeding, and she showed it to me. It is a dark -green marble-shaped bead, apparently of very roughly made glass, rather more than half an inch in diameter, and with a hole through it. On it are five wavy lines, two white and three orange, inlaid (not painted). They might represent snakes, but not Arabic writing. It must be hung on a red silk, preferably twisted silk such as is "used for buttonholes in a soldier's coat," with three knots, the first at about three inches from the stone, the next at another three inches, and so on. Then some drops of the blood must be allowed to fall on it. It must hang low down on the back over the shoulders next to the skin. Then, as the blood dries on the stone, so the blood in the body dries up, and

^ For V. see vol. xxi., pp. 222-7.