Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/349

 Ceremonial Customs of the British Gipsies. 327

it to the Gipsies as a special treat, but who had made the lamentable mistake of sending it to the tents in a blanket in order to keep it hot.'^ The plight of Eros Heme, when a friendly ^^b brought him some mushrooms in a handker- chief, was less deplorable ; there was no call for immediate consumption in his case, so he was able to thank the donor profusely for the gift, and to feed his bantam with it as soon as he was gone. Hubert Smith, the son of Shandres and Lavinia, had serious thoughts of separating from Xxxs potter wife because she persisted in washing his cooking utensils and crockery and table linen in the same bowl, with the same piece of soap, and sometimes even in the same water as she used for washing wearing-apparel and herself He contented himself, however, with destroying everything.^* None of this family of Smiths will take drinking water from a stream in which some of their cousins washed several years ago.^'' Saiki Heme, Hros's wife, once dashed her sugar basin and its contents against an adjoining wall because a comb from her hair accidentally fell on them. If it had been a hair brush, a nail brush, or a pair of scissors, she would have done exactly the same. Things can even be mokJiadi by association or resemblance ; hence the widespread avoidance of white crockery.

By some a sick person is considered to be mokhadi, and has a special set of crockery and a knife, fork, and spoon assigned to him, which are destroyed when the illness terminates. This taboo does not appear to have such a wide currency as some of the others, being confined, as far as I know at present, to the Cambridgeshire Smiths ^^ and "Jasper Petulengro's" family. Perhaps it is due, not to survival, but to the confusing of ordinary maladies with childbirth.

The last class of taboos is concerned with animals, and like

28 Ibid., vol. iv., p. 156. 2D ji)id.^ vol. iv., p. 265.

'" Ibid., vol. iii., pp. 232-3.


 * Gipsy Smith, his Life and Work ; by Himself {\<)Q\), p. 7.