Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/614

596 emblems of longevity, fecundity, and wealth. They have an occult influence on the weal of the living.

Before the procession moves, twelve bowls of soup, in which pellets of dough float, are offered, with prostrations, to the dead. The number twelve and the vernacular name of the pellets express completeness, and are a funereal charade. Four or more men, hired for high wages, bear the coffin. It is followed to the grave by male friends, all in mourning, with tall white caps. The women, with white scarfs on their heads, go but a short distance from the house to a fork in the road, where a lad has been stationed with a banyan-branch. There they burn incense, make obeisance to the coffin, break off a twig of the banyan, and return by a route other than the one by which they came. A convenient superstition preserves them from a long journey on their maimed feet, and declares that they "must not follow the dead to death."

The sons of the deceased carry each a staff of bamboo or of banyan, which is left at the grave. Spirit-money is scattered along the road to buy right of way from demons that might oppose. The coffin being lowered, each person in the procession takes up some mortar in the flap of his tunic and casts it into the grave. When the pit is filled and rounded, sesame, whose vernacular name means completion, is planted on the top, to grow in sun and rain. A new, small gilded image, that has been brought with the coffin to the tomb, has a dot added to a hieroglyphic upon it, changing the meaning of the said hieroglyphic from king to lord. At this instant it becomes a household god, and is carried back with reverence to be placed on the shrine of the lares in the house, and worshiped with oblations.

During three years, on the anniversary of the death, presents of paper clothing are sent to the deceased by burning them. So long as there are male descendants living, they worship the grave in the seventh month of each year. When the family becomes so large that a division of the estate and separate dwellings are expedient, the images of the progenitors are inherited by the eldest son.

would make interest the ultimate criterion in the selection of reading for improvement. Knowledge is most easily attained in those subjects which we like most and take the most interest in. Our best course should be, having become interested in a subject, to read the best books upon it. By this rule we will read widely, and perhaps superficially; but thus reading, with freshness and vigor eager to be enlightened on this particular thing, will we not get more knowledge and be vastly more benefited than the man "who, with slow and painful steps, wearily plods through a list of books, though that list has in it all the masterpieces of creation"?