Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/328

 320 A. C. H addon.

one, in this case, dare omit to go and weep over the corpse, otherwise he would be held to be a sorcerer. All the tribe, also, goes into mourning for some months ; the mourning consists of blackening the whole body with charcoal. In some villages they light a fire on the grave, which the parents of the deceased should tend during a fortnight. The whole of this interval is for them a period of complete seclusion. Their food is brought to them, they take it without saying a word, and their silence is only interrupted by funeral songs in honour of the dead. On a fixed day the fire is quenched ; women respectfully exhume the bones of the defunct, and they hand them over to the nearest relation. These bones are to him a sacred trust ; and when it is a woman who thus receives the relics of her husband, she places them in a basket which she decorates as well as she is able, and always carries it with her, especially on feast-days, visits, and receptions. I can tell you nothing about the religion of our savages, it is a confused collection of gross superstitions in which one cannot find any precise dogma." ("Woodlark," Oct. 12, 1851). — Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, xxv, 1854.