Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/155

 Rh noted, and was made so much of that the subjects of the hoax renounced personal adornment, retiring into the ranks of the daily toilers.

Yet another story, which this time has frail woman for its object.

A pair of young girls, considering no man good enough for them, decided to remain spinsters, and had a house built for themselves somewhat apart from the village. Near this habitation an old man possessed a small garden, and the ladies annoyed him much by continually helping themselves to his fruit unasked; he repeatedly cautioned them, but they proved incorrigible; and, in his wrath, he sacrificed and prayed to the gods to cause these women to become pregnant. To their great shame and astonishment in due time each gave birth to a son. They concealed the fact for some time, but at last decided to notify the village elders, and call all the young men together to see if any would admit being the father, but all denied even a bowing acquaintance with the mothers. At last a half-witted fellow advised the women to tell the children to go to their father and borrow some betel-nut, when, to the humiliation of the erstwhile proud beauties, the two boys straightway went to the old man, who thus became possessed of a brace of handsome young wives.

There is a tradition that long ago, at a certain place, an immense buffalo could be seen, about sundown, roaming round as if in search of food. The beholder would feel his head gradually swelHng and his abdomen distending; naturally the afflicted beholders never failed to get away from the place as quickly as possible.

Another legend relates how at full moon, when the members of a certain tribe went down by moonlight to visit an adjacent village, a gigantic man, with pheasant tail-feathers in his hair, could be seen squatting in the middle of the road. Any one seeing this apparition was so startled that he trembled and fell, the spectre vanishing before he recovered.

Among local customs there is one peculiar to the more southern aboriginals. Every fifth year the tribes composing a confederation gather in the house of the head chief, each man bringing with him a tube about seventy feet long, made of the thicker parts of bamboos jointed together. Around a small circle, in which the chief stands, over a