Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/691

Rh things? "We don't want them! Take them with you if you are so stuck up; we'll bury them with you!"

They work themselves into a perfect fury, and one gets a whip and flogs the corpse until it is horribly mutilated. Then the few who have really been friends to the child in their crude way draw near and begin to sing:

which this native African assured me meant, as nearly as he could translate it—

The curious identity of the name for father in this African dialect and our own he could not explain.

Even while the relatives were thus speaking kindly to the departed child, others would come up with whips, and with blows spitefully exclaim: "Tell my father's sister I am happy. Speak to her for me." This they said, mocking the relatives for sending messages.

What better proof is required of the origin of the peculiar custom of the negroes in our own Southland of sending communications by the dead? He also gave me new stories of Brother Conch, and a tale of a rabbit and a pitch-man.

He says he has heard a savage tribe often sing to the beat of a peculiar drum, as they started to pillage and destroy a neighboring tribe, these words, which he could not translate:

Some of the tribes are followers of Mohammed. After they have broken their fast, they sing this hymn to their God:

I then sang for him a part of "Gawd bless dem Yankees, dey'll set me free," and when I came to the humming, which we all know