Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/226

218 have become a Bhūta as ruthless as the manner of his death had been, and his power had been concentrated in the little instrument with which he had been so cruelly murdered. So people who wished to wreak revenge came and made offerings at the little shrine in which it had been placed, in the faith that some evil would thereby befall their enemies. I sent to bring the spur away, for it properly belonged to the Court, and so broke the spell.

I remember, too, a Brahman Munshi attached to me, an intelligent man, well versed in English, being in great perturbation at finding, on coming from his house in the morning, a parcel containing sticks, hair, and some other objects, wrapt in a plantain-leaf, laid upon his threshold. He believed it had been placed there by an enemy with incantations meant to bring misfortune or sickness on himself or family. That, too, appears to have been essentially an Obeah, and on the same lines as the curious clay object, laid not long ago with malicious intent upon the threshold of a house in Scotland, and now placed by Dr. Tylor in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford.

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