Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/576

266 be successful, yet, as my friend Colonel T. C. Hodson remarked over twenty years ago, there is fundamental unity. Mr. Hutton has also done much to bring this out, showing how the population of these hills is a mixture of many races, which mixture has resulted in a great variety of customs, but also in a strange streak of similarity running through them all. One of the objects of my paper to-night is to produce evidence of this unity.

I will begin with a simple love tale, because we all love a lover; also because it is a good instance of the sentimental poetic vein which is to be found in all these folk. If there are any happy lovers here I hope that their tale may end more happily than that of Khashima and his love Thingraila, but the "they lived happily ever after" ending is seldom to be found in the tales of the people of these hills.

Once upon a time there was a youth Khashima in Lambui, he was the son of a rich man and he was very handsome, and as he grew to manhood he wanted to marry, but as yet he knew not what love was. At that time there lived in Kazai a most beautiful girl called Thingraila, the daughter of a very rich man, and she also knew not what it was to love. So she waited. One day as Khashima sat in his garden a large bee came flying by, and he caught the bee and tied a hair from his head round the bee's waist, and to this he tied a bead and he sent the bee away as a messenger; but before he let him go he said to the bee, "Fly away to her and fly back to me, bringing me word of her." So he sent him. And the bee flew straight to Thingraila's bosom, and she caught it and saw the hair and the beautiful bead tied to its waist. And she wondered