Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/25

Rh This stone possessed a power of conferring leprosy upon any person on whom the spell might be worked. It is by no means clear to what extent its proprietors were able, or supposed to be able, to exercise their volition in the matter; but the medium by which the thing was said to be effected was an act of contact. It was not necessary that the doomed person's body should touch Katalewe. It was enough if a person who bore a grudge could obtain possession of his intended victim's masi, or of some scraps of his food-refuse or other rejected rubbish, and by the medium of the proprietor of the stone—Taukei ni vatu—it was placed on or against it. The owner of the article would thereafter develop leprosy. This was the usual mode by which Katalewe was believed to operate; but the practice varies somewhat curiously in different parts of Navitilevu and with different stones. So potent, indeed, was this one, that the creeping stems of the couch-grass and the runners of any little creeper or plant which grew hard by invariably withered and died off, or else turned aside so soon as their extremities reached to within a space equal to eighteen or twenty inches of the stone. Over a patch of ground as large as a sponge-bath, therefore, of which Katalewe was the centre, the sur-