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228 fields. This thief-catching motive is characteristically set, for example, in the following Bahama opening: "Dis was a man had a fiel'; an' ev'ry time he go, he lose his t'ings. He say, 'All right, I know jus' what to do. I'll put somebody here to watch out to see who does take my t'ings.' An' dey cyarry dis baby in de fiel' … (dis was an obeah baby, a witch baby)."

Notable, too, in a comparison of variants is the fact that the courtship incident does not always occur nor is the tar figure always female. In the Louisiana variant the figure is male, so, too, in a Barbadoes variant I collected, in a Florida variant and in several Bahama variants. In Cape Verde Islands variants the figure is referred to as menin pret, little black one, a male implied.

Nor is the figure, so to speak, always a figure; in some variants the trap is a bucket of tar. For example, in a North Carolina variant, "De fox, in order to git de rabbit, he fixes a