Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/527

 Collectanea. 493

Come and live with me and I will treat you kindly." Now the land of these cannibals is surrounded by a deep river, but the ogress knew a charm by which she crossed it, and so they came to her home. She left the elder boy outside, but she put the younger in the room where she kept her charms. When the boys went to sleep the husband of the ogress said : " Let us kill and eat." But she felt the little boy and said : " He is not fat enough." This happened on several nights, and the boy heard what she said. So one morning he said to his brother : " Her husband wants to eat us. He must be a cannibal." But the elder brother said that the pair loved them, and would do them no harm. The little boy said : " You tell her husband that you have such a bad stomach ache that you cannot sleep outside." So that night the elder boy slept in the house. In the night he heard the ogress discussing whether the boys were fat enough to eat. So the boys arranged to escape. The younger took the charm of the ogress, and by this means they succeeded in crossing the river. As the ogress had lost her charm she could not pursue them and they got home safely.

[Instances of charms for crossing rivers come from South India. When the Kapus and Balijas were driven by the Muhammadans to the river Pennar, they found it in flood. While they were at a loss what to do, the Malas, who followed them, offered one of their children to their tribal goddess, whereupon the waters parted and the fugitives were able to cross (E. Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 1909, vol. iv., p. 344).

The Tottiyans venerate ihe/>ongu tree {j>ongamia g/adra) because, when they were in like peril, two of these trees on the river bank bent forward, and meeting in the middle, formed an arch by which they crossed {Ibid., vol. vii., p. 186 sq).

Mr. E. Sidney Hartland writes :

"The incident of a personage of supernatural powers making a passage across a river or other water is common. Its most familiar examples are the crossing of the Red Sea by Moses and of the Jordan by Joshua. Examples may be mentioned from the Mweru of British East Africa (Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, London, 19 10, vol. ii., p. 426), the MandeDyoula of the Ivory Coast (Clozei & Villamur, Les coutumes Indigenes de la Cdte d'lvoire, Paris, 1902, p. 44), the Matse tribe of the Ewhe in German