Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/484

 450 accused by one of his father’s wives of making an attempt on her virtue. Hearing of this, his father attacked him with a drawn sword, and he, in order to save his father from the sin of murder, prayed for immediate death. He disappeared in the ground, and a pillar of clay rose from the spot, and out of it a supernatural voice proclaimed his innocency. Down to the present day pilgrims, after shaving their heads, do the triple circumambulation (pradakshina) of Sudderan’s column, always keeping it on their right. After this they cast seven clods or brick-bats at the adjoining tomb of his father, muttering curses on its occupant. Burton thinks that this is copied from the Arab rite mentioned above; but this seems to be doubtful. (R. F. Burton, Sind Revisited, London, 1877, ii. 85 ff.)

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 (Vol. xxvii., p. 94.)

Easter Egg custom is more widespread than is shown in the “Catalogue of Brand Material.” I used to roll dyed eggs on “Egg Monday” when I was a boy in Ross and Cromarty, and we had an “Egg Sunday.” We afterwards burned whin and searched for shellfish. In Edinburgh here I find the dyed eggs are rolled in Bruntsfield Links. The custom was quite common all over Scotland until recently. It has been stamped out by unimaginative school teachers and parsons.

 

(Ante, pp. 300, 301). or Begging Day has been observed in North Devon within my recollection. The agricultural labourers’ wives in the remote districts would call at the different farmhouses in the neighbourhood for a penny.

For Bradninch, Dorset, read Devon (p. 303).

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