Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/218

 2o8 Collectanea.

ate roast pork. The Montenegrins believe that pork must be eaten to show you are not a Moslem. They explained the bread trough by saying "Christ was born in a manger." Next day, Christmas day, we paid and received numerous visits. Every visitor to our house (male that is) had to shove the badnyak a little further into the fire and lay an offering on the further end, usually an orange or sugar plum. The badnyak was saved to burn on New Year's day. The ashes are thrown on the fields to make them fertile.

This is what I saw. But last year the Montenegrin consul in Scutari, Albania, told me I had not seen the full ceremony. He stated that when he was a boy, and at the time of telling he was only twenty-eight, his father always cut the throat of a sheep on the badnyak, and that those who could not afford a sheep sacri- ficed a fowl. He regarded the present custom of pouring wine as a degenerate substitute for blood.

You note that in Montenegro at Christmas all the family drinks wine from the same beaker. Till recently, and still in many places the whole family does, Christmas or no Christmas.

The same Montenegrin consul told me that when he was a child he saw his grandmother every first of March stir the wood ashes on the hearth with a pair of horns (goats', sheeps', or oxens'). This was to protect the house from the witches, who always assemble on that day. The following day a large heap of rubbish was always burned, but he did not know why.

M. Edith Durham.

Notes on Scottish Folklore.

The jaiv of a hedgehog used as a cure for toothache. — A country- man and native of Glenluce, Wigtonshire, told me lately that he knew an old farmer some years ago who had a firm belief in the efficacy of a hedgehog's jaw for keeping off the toothache. He had been long troubled with a bad tooth, and his remedy was to take the jaw bone of a hedgehog and put it in his waistcoat pocket on the side where the bad tooth was. The jaw-bone was most carefully wrapped up in a piece of the best cloth, and