Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/40

16 oak already alluded to at Old Beyrout not only had rags sometimes suspended on it, but a root that arches above-ground cures those who crawl beneath it of rheumatism and lumbago, and secures easy child-birth to mothers. This tree is so sacred that a man's arm withered who dared to cut a branch.

Sacred wells and fountains do not seem to be common now in the Lebanon. But the one now called Ain Salaam, at Brumana, was formerly called Ain Jīn. It was then a waste wilderness, and the villagers dared not pass the Ain alone at night. A Greek priest declares he often saw Jīn marriages being consummated there, and that he had contracted such an intimacy with the fairy-folk, that he alone could exorcise them from persons who had become possessed by them. A friend of mine, a Protestant, once in the old times lost his way after nightfall in that neighbourhood, and not a soul could he get to lead him past Ain Jīn.

Ordeal is still sometimes practised rather shamefacedly, or after other means have failed, for the detection of crime. A sorceress at Roomy undertakes to discover a person who has cast an Evil Eye on another, by dropping melted tin into cold water. The Arabic letter nearest to the form the tin assumes is the initial of the culprit's name. She is also a discoverer of thieves. Some use divination for the same purpose by counting beads while they say in turn: "Brown eye, light-brown eye, blue eye, black eye, black hair, grey hair, light hair," &c.

Sacrificial survivals may perhaps be traced in the killing of sheep or oxen, as at the opening of the Beyrout-Damascus railway; at the finishing of a new house, when everybody helps at the last job, the whitewashing of a ceiling; or when several men will take a lamb to a bridegroom and kill it for the wedding-feast. Even our Protestant missionaries fell in with the custom at the re-christening of Ain Salaam.

Customs connected with bread arc curious. It is unlucky to cut the thin cake-loaves with a knife : they must be torn