Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/111

Rh as a boy, run off with another boy's clothes while bathing. I can find no trace of these legends in Indian records.

While on tour in 1908 on the Irrawaddy River I found a raft floating unattended towards the sea. In each of the two shrines built upon it was an image of Shin Upăgôk, so thickly plastered with gold that the features were partly obliterated. It was said to have come from Upper Burma. In such fear was the god held that no one dared steal the images.

The Upper Burma Gazetteer (I. ii. 100) mentions an image of the nat of rain in human form as having been thrown into the Irrawaddy in a palace ceremony before the British annexation. I have not had an opportunity of enquiring whether this was Shin Upăgôk.

It is a common practice to wash the images of Buddha in the temples during a drought.

A curious story is told in The Indian Antiquary (1896, p. 112) about an imperfect harrow which was supposed to be keeping off rain. It had to be decked with flowers, broken, and thrown into the river.

Treatment of disease.—The Upper Burma Gazetteer (I. ii. 29) describes a class of healer called natsăya, or wizard, who is called in when ordinary means fail, and treats the patient by dancing before the image of a nat and working himself up into a state of ecstasy. He is distinct from the ordinary native doctor, and seemingly also from the spirit-medium or fortune-teller already described, but I have no personal knowledge of his class.

An attempt to deceive Death himself and induce him to pass over a sick boy was described by me in Man for February 1909. A bamboo was cut to his exact length, and cuttings from his hair, finger-nails, and toe-nails placed in it. The bamboo was then clothed and put in a coffin, which was carried through the streets in a procession of mourners and interred at the cemetery with the usual funeral rites.