Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/304

296 burning on every stone, and on such nights no one would go near; the stones are there beHeved to mark burial-places. Amongst the Indians of New England, and the Eskimo, lights seen on the roofs of their wigwams and huts portend death. Lights seem everywhere associated with death. Mahommedans place lamps in small triangular recesses made in the heads of their tombs. The custom of chapelles ardentes may have had some such origin.

A belief, allied to the present subject, prevails in some parts of India that, when a man has been killed by a tiger, his ghost sits upon the tiger's forehead and guides the beast on its nightly prowl for prey; the cunning and wariness of old man-eaters is ascribed to this ghostly guidance. I had often heard of this belief, and once heard a story at first hand from an old native shikary, who professed to have seen an instance. The great river Cavèry runs across the peninsula from the Western Ghauts to the Bay of Bengal on the East. About midway on its course it passes a wild, thinly-inhabited jungly tract; in the district of Coimbatore, a tiger had for a considerable time haunted this tract and killed several persons, amongst then a Brahman. A double reward had been offered for killing it without avail, and it was rumoured that the Brahman's ghost sat on its head and warned it of any danger. The people became afraid to go from one village to another, and at last sent for the most renowned and experienced shikary of that country side. He was a tall, gaunt, elderly man, who well knew the habits of all beasts of the jungle, and had killed numbers in his day. The tiger had for some time been prowling round one of the villages in the jungle, and the old shikary, after surveying the ground, mounted at dusk, with his long gun, into a tree commanding some open spaces on the village outskirts, where he thought it likely the tiger would come. Towards midnight he saw a light gleaming and winding amongst the bushes. Presently it passed across an open, and he could dimly discern the figure of the tiger stealing along with the light apparently