Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/32

8 a silkworm-shed, and on very many other occasions, for the same reasons. Europeans are always excused from this, as their ignorance of these things involves no risk. At funeral-feasts, boiled wheat, flavoured with spices, almonds, hazel-nuts, walnuts, or pine-seeds, is distributed among the relatives of the deceased, and especially to priests, often at the exit-door of the church, when the mourners, as they take it in passing, say : "May God bless him for whom we eat this now." If eaten in the house of mourning itself, the same formula is used. Druze men are buried lying on the back, Druze women lying on the left arm. I could not learn that windows or doors had to be left open when the spirit left the body, though I diligently inquired.

There are few games natural to children in the Lebanon beyond dances, akin in some cases to those of the Bedouin encampments. These children of the desert are not uncommon, as they bring their sheep to pasture among the mountains. These dances may be thus described : Eight or nine girls stand in a semicircle, while two others, representing the lovesick swain and coquettish maiden respectively, dance to and fro in front of them, approaching, receding, and passing each other, with gestures of persuasion, rejection, disappointment, forgiveness, coolness, and final reconciliation, appropriate doubtless to the thread of story that runs through the song. Then they change to another song more lively and animated, that we understand dwells upon the prowess of some young warrior Sheikh, and all dance with clasped hands, suddenly separating, and clapping, with a step to rear, a step to left, a step forward into position, rejoining hands, while the whole ring is slowly moving round from left to right. On Palm Sunday, in some places, girls dance on the threshing-floors, exactly as did the virgins of Shiloh when the wifeless Benjamites rushed upon them from their hiding-