Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/362

354 birds. The Indian ground thrush (Pitta coronata) is said to have once possessed the peacock's plumes, but one day when bathing the peacock stole its dress; ever since the Pitta has gone about the jungle crying out for its lost garments. According to another legend, the bird was formerly a prince who was deeply in love with a beautiful princess. His father sent him to travel for some years, and on his return the princess was dead. He still wanders disconsolately about calling her name. It is also said that the peacock, being a bird of sober plumage, borrowed the brilliant coat of the Pitta to attend a wedding, and did not return it. The disconsolate Pitta wanders through the jungle calling on the peacock to restore its dress—hence the cry, ayittam, ayittam (my dress, my dress). The cry of the hornbill (Kandetta) is inauspicious and a suie sign of drought. The bird is doomed to suffer intolerable thirst; not being able to drink from any stream or rill, it has the power only to catch the rain-drops in its bill to quench its thirst, and keeps continually crying for rain.

The Witch's Ladder (ante, pp. 1, 81, 257).—The following letters appeared in the Guardian of September 21 and 28:—

Sir—I was greatly amused, as, doubtless, were many of your readers, at the incident which occurred at the close of Dr. Tylor's learned paper read before the British Association on a so-called "witch's ladder" found at Wellington, Somerset, and was forcibly reminded of more than one similar ludicrous scene in English fiction. Two members rose and said that the "witch's ladder" was no "witch's ladder" at all, but a rope used for driving deer. The description given of the "ladder," as a rope in which feathers were fixed at right angles, reminded me of a passage in Virgil which would seem to confirm the view of the two sceptics:—

The "formido" is explained by Connington as "the name of the cord with red feathers which the hunters stretched along the openings of the woods to drive the game into the net." It is again referred to