Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/359

 Miscellanea. , 351

with eyes shut, and opens them to look at the sky. Meanwhile some near relation has to lie down on her bed. Strings of green mango leaves are hung across the doors of her house and her relatiotts'. The hair on the child's head when it is born has to be cut on the seventh, fourteenth, or twenty-first day, and then one or two goats are sacri- ficed, not a bone of them must be broken. The child's head is then shaved, and the hair's weight in gold or silver is given to the poor ; the hair is buried. On its first birthday, a long cord is taken and a knot made in it, this being done on each birthday following. [The reader will remember the Peruvian quipu.'\ This interesting paper flows into a Dead Sea of moral reflections, and there's an end.

440. Kulu custom. — If a pregnant woman dies, the husband must have done some sin, and must e.xpiate it by a pilgrimage. The child is removed from the body, and the woman buried.

446. Garhiual — Harvest ceremony. A grass rope is fixed up on a hill-top running down to the valley ; a board pierced with a hole runs on it. A man dressed in white goes up to the top, and with much abuse and some chaff invokes his ancestors to see him safe down ; wife and children wait at the bottom. Then down he goes on the wooden saddle, looking " rather like an angel". His descent is stopped by a blanket wound round the rope. He carries two bags of sand on his ankles for ballast. This now becomes sacred, also his hair, especially for disease and barrenness. He distributes the sand and pulls out tufts of hair for those who give him presents. The narrator thinks this is a softened human sacrifice. It benefits the crops.

447. Tonsure of a child among the Bejal Seths. — At the proper age it is done at the house door. By him stand two persons in disguise, one holding a bow and arrow, the other a shoe. The women mourn on seeing the child hairless. It is an unlucky day, and some neigh- bour has to cook the food and light the lamps for them. A very stupid story, obviously made up from the practice, is told to account for it.

W. H. D. Rouse.