Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/46

32 proceed to the river and bathe, and having thus lustrated themselves, they repair to the banquet and eat, drink, and make merry as though they never were to die.' With more continuance of affection, Naga tribes of Assam celebrate their funeral feasts month by month, laying food and drink on the graves of the departed. In the same region of the world, the Kol tribes of Chota Nagpur are remarkable for their pathetic reverence for their dead. When a Ho or Munda has been burned on the funeral pile, collected morsels of his bones are carried in procession with a solemn, ghostly, sliding step, keeping time to the deep-sounding drum, and when the old woman who carries the bones on her bamboo tray lowers it from time to time, then girls who carry pitchers and brass vessels mournfully reverse them to show that they are empty; thus the remains are taken to visit every house in the village, and every dwelling of a friend or relative for miles, and the inmates come out to mourn and praise the goodness of the departed; the bones are carried to all the dead man's favourite haunts, to the fields he cultivated, to the grove he planted, to the threshing-floor where he worked, to the village dance-room where he made merry. At last they are taken to the grave, and buried in an earthen vase upon a store of food, covered with one of those huge stone slabs which European visitors wonder at in the districts of the aborigines in India. Besides these, monumental stones are set up outside the village to the memory of men of note; they are fixed on an earthen plinth, where the ghost, resting in its walks among the living, is supposed to sit shaded by the pillar. The Kheriahs have collections of these monuments in the little enclosures round their houses, and offerings and libations are constantly made at them. With what feelings such rites are celebrated may be judged from this Ho dirge: —

'We never scolded you; never wronged you; Come to us back!