Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/114

90 got violent possession of all his mother's means, and kept them. The other brother determined that he would make him disgorge it all. He hit upon the following device. After his mother had been consigned to her kindred dust, he opened the grave at the dead of night, and placed the coffin, standing on end, leaning hard against his brother's door. When the door was opened in the morning, the coffin fell with a thud flat into the house. Her rising from the grave was believed to have been owing to her dissatisfaction and grief at the illiberality of the smith in connection with her funeral. Another funeral ceremony on a much grander scale, and more expressive of admiration and gratitude, was gone through, and she was laid a second time in her long home ; the smith, congratulating himself that he had acted handsomely by his mother's remains, and that she would now rest and be at peace. But to his dismay it was not to be so. However, to make a long story short, the same thing was repeated by the two brothers, the one taking her out of her grave, at intervals, seven times in seven years, and the other brother making each successive funeral more munificent, until he became poorer than his brother whom he had defrauded. This legend is supposed to be the origin of the Lewis proverb : "Cho sgith 'sa bha'n gotha de Mhàthair." ("As tired as the smith was of his mother.") XI. — "Eolas-Cronnachaidh." (The Science of Checking.) The story is related of a Kintyre man of a bygone generation, who happened to be ploughing one day, when one who was strongly possessed of the Evil Eye crossed the field quite close to the horses. He looked hard at them as he passed along ; the result was that they were so smitten by his Evil Eye, that they at once fell quite helpless into the furrow. They lay wallowing there, but could not rise. He, however, knew a man in the neighbourhood noted for the "Eolas-Cronnachaidh" (the checking science). He went at once for him. The exorcist came and sprinkled them with water in which salt was dissolved, and poured some of it into their ears. This cure had the effect of restoring them as speedily as they had been disabled. What accompaniments in the shape of "Eora" may have been gone through my informant did not happen to know. "Eora" were words uttered while performing a cure of the