Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/115

 Rh Jat, ii, p. 181. A dishonest man, who has been entrusted with some ploughshares, excuses himself for not returning them, on the ground that the mice have nibbled them. The word nibbled may be translated eaten; no doubt, the mice have nibbled it, would ordinarily be reason for throwing anything away.

(This may have passed into a proverb very early: we have in Herondas 3. 76, οί μύς όμοίως τον σίδηρον τρώγουσιν.)

Lastly, in the Tevijja Sutta (trans, by Davids, Sacr. Books, xi, 196), we have a rebuke for such men as get a living " by divinations from the manner in which cloth and other such things have been bitten by rats".

"BOGLES" AND "GHOSTS".

To the Editor of.

,—In the September No. of I have read with interest Mr. Stuart-Glennie's excellent article on "Animism"; and as in a footnote (see foot of page 298, vol. iii, No. 3) he refers to one of the Lincolnshire legends contributed by me, I wish to correct a slight misapprehension, for which I am perhaps myself responsible. I write at a disadvantage, as I have not the original by me to refer to; but if I said what Mr. Stuart-Glennie quotes, I expressed myself badly. I did not mean to assert that "bogles" meant "corpses (or emanations from them), etc. etc. ... till corruption had completed its work", for this would have been a sweeping assertion, and would have inferred that these only were "bogles", and "bogles" were always these.

I meant that these emanations were called "bogles" certainly; but the name was also applied to all kinds of supernatural appearances, and I have heard it used where a sound or voice only was concerned. In fact, I heard no