Page:Old Deccan Days.djvu/267

 Rh his own voice, attract to himself and handle with impunity all the snakes which might be within hearing in any thicket or dry stone wall, such as in that country is their favourite refuge. So great was the popular excitement regarding him, under the belief that he was an incarnation of some divinity, that the magistrate of Poona took note of his proceedings, and becoming uneasy as to the political turn the excitement regarding the boy might take, reported regularly to Government the growth of the crowds who pressed to see the marvel, and to offer gifts to the child and his parents! The poor boy, however, was at last bitten by one of the reptiles and died, and the wonder ceased.

CHUNDUN RAJAH.

Page 174.—There are innumerable popular superstitions regarding the powers which can be conveyed in a charmed necklace; and it is a common belief that good and bad fortune, and life itself, can be made to depend on its not being removed from the wearer's neck.

CHANDRA'S VENGEANCE.

Page 188.—The picture of the childless wife setting forth to seek Mahadeo, and resolving not to return till she has seen him, is one which would find a parallel in some of the persons composing almost every group of pilgrims who resort to the great shrines of Hindostan. Any one who has an opportunity of quietly questioning the members of such an assemblage will find that, besides the miscellaneous crowd of idlers, there are usually specimens of two classes of very earnest devotees. The one class is intent on the performance of some act of ascetic devotion, the object of which is to win the favour of the Divinity, or to fulfil a vow for a favour already granted. The other class is seeking 'to see the Divinity,' and expecting the revelation under one or other of the terrible forms of the Hindoo Pantheon. There are few things more pathetic than to hear one of this class recount the wanderings and sufferings of his past search, or the journeys he has before him, which are too often prolonged till death puts an end to the wanderer and his pilgrimage.

Page 189.—The 'fire which does not burn' is everywhere in India one of the attributes of Mahadeo.

In many parts of the Deccan are to be found shrines consecrated to one of the local gods, who has been Brahmanically recognised as a local manifestation of Mahadeo, where the annual festival of the divinity was, within the last few years, kept by lighting huge fires, through which devotees ran or jumped, attributing their escape from burning to the interposition of Mahadeo. Except in a few remote villages, this custom, which sometimes led to serious accidents, has, in British territory, been stopped by the police.

Page 192.—This story of the wonderful child who was found floating in a box on a river is to be heard, with more or less picturesque variations, on the banks of all the large rivers in India. Almost every old village in Sind has a local tradition of this kind.

Page 197.—Most households in Calcutta can furnish recollections of depredations by birds at their nest-building season, similar to that of the Ranee's bangles by the Eagles in this story. But the object of the theft is generally more prosaic. I have known gold rings so taken, but the plunder is more frequently a lady's cuff, or collar, or a piece of lace; and the plunderers are crows, and sometimes, but very rarely, a kite.

Page 202.—Purwaris, or outcasts, who are not suffered to live within the quarter inhabited by the higher castes, are very numerous in Southern India, and a legend similar to this one is a frequent popular explanation of their being in excess as compared with other classes of the population.