Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/385

Rh noxious vapours at night, or its foliage is less impervious to drenching dews. There must be some solution of the belief, for such beliefs are usually based on some well-founded experience. In Switzerland no native of the country will sleep under a walnut-tree; even a few minutes' nap on a hot summer's afternoon is seriously deprecated, and the people will get up and move to some more favoured shade rather than run the risk of the only assured one sleep that the shade of the walnut-tree must entail. In Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines, by E. Beaufort, there is, curiously enough, an allusion to the same idea. Miss Beaufort writes, "The peasants of Syria declare that it is unhealthy to sleep under walnut-trees, and the dragomans always advise us not to do so."

A pretty and graceful legend attaches, in India, to the Tulsee plant, which carries one back to the old tales of days gone by. Only in England the rose-tree plays the sort of part the Tulsee plays out here. In almost every village the Tulsee plant in its mud pillar may be seen, either growing up at the door of a hut, or close by the village well, or near the village shrine. The story is that Krishna, in one of his many roamings, fell in love with a fair young wife, who scorned his suit. Unable to win her affections, he determined to remove her husband, the obstacle to his success; and in due course the husband was killed. But the brave leal-hearted wife ascended the funeral pyre; preferring death with the husband she loved to life with the hated lover, she cast herself into the flames and expired. From her ashes sprang up the shrub, which, in remorseful memory of her constancy, Krishna called by her name of Tulsee.