Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/290

282 Evil Eye: pollution by touch (in one case cow's urine counteracts it). If a man finds a snake crossing his path he must put a rag torn off his clothes on the track of it, else he falls sick. Two snakes fighting or intertwined foreshow death, unless he casts away the clothes he wears, bathes, etc.

286. Beena Marriage.—A youth in the Vindhya mountains sen-es his father-in-law for the bride, like Jacob. He often serves eight or ten years.

287. Buddhists of Tibet use trumpets made of the human thigh-bone.

322. Tibetan Kinship.—Tables of names, in which I note that father's elder brother is called big father, his wife, big mother; fathers younger brother, little father, his wife, little mother. [" Aunt" in Latin is matertera, which means really something like "other mother".]

323. Mirzapur. Rustic Games.—One is played with mango leaves, and the central person is called "Thief". Ball. In one, the runner must not be out of breath.

324. Charms to keep demons away from babies during the mothers isolation. Thorny plant hung at the door; fire kept burning there with a piece of iron in it. Visitors wash their feet and warm them over this fire; guns fired. .

Blood Covenant.—Miss Russell points out to me that in Mr. Bret Harte's Sally Dows, the heroine having sucked the young man's blood from a snake-bite wound, is told by an old negress that she can marry nobody else, as this has bound them together. This is the converse of the idea that blood communion bars sexual intercourse, an idea exemplified in many European stories of the Swan-Maid type, the oldest British Isles instance being that of Cuchulainn and the Daughter of the King of Lochlann, which is at least as old as the twelfth century and in all likelihood, centuries older. Some of the readers of may be able to cite further examples of the belief held by Mr. Bret Harte's negress. The opposing views may possibly coincide with differences of race or with differences of culture-development.

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 Fire o' Stones.—I cannot quite agree with one of your contributors that the "Fire o' Stones" custom has died out altogether. A year or two ago I read of an instance in which the old ritual had been employed by an evicted tenant. I cannot, unluckily, be sure whether he was of Fermanagh or another county; but I remember the incident of scattering the stones afterwards all over the country-side.

Nora Hopper.

