Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/467

 Rh of cloth, bits of rope, slips of paper, writings, bamboo strings, flags, tags, and prayers hanging from every temple", and small piles of stones at the foot of every image and memorial stone, and on every altar by the wayside; and he draws attention to the similarity of the practices implied to those of his native country. Another traveller in Japan states that women who desire children go to a certain sacred stone on the holy hill of Nikko, and throw pebbles at it. If they succeed in hitting it their wish is granted. They seem very clever at the game, he says maliciously. Further, the same writer speaks of a seated statue of Buddha in the park of Uyeno at Tokio, on whose knees women flung stones with the same object. Describing a temple elsewhere, he records that the grotesque figures placed at the door were covered—or, as he more accurately puts it, constellated—with pellets of chewed paper shot through the railing that surrounded them by persons who had some wish to be fulfilled. A successful shot implied the probability of the attainment of the shooter's desire.

As might be anticipated, practices of this kind are not confined to Europe and Asia. A French traveller in the region of the Congo relates with astonishment concerning the n'doké—which he portrays as "fetishes important enough to occupy a special hut, and confided to the care of a sort of priests, who alone are reputed to have the means of making them speak"—that when it is desired to invoke the fetish, one or more pieces of native cloth, and the like, are offered to the fetish, or to the fetish priest; and the worshipper is then admitted to plant a nail in the statue, the priest meanwhile, or the worshipper himself, formulating his prayer or his desires.

To sum up. We find widely spread in Europe the practice of throwing pins into sacred wells, or sticking pins