Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/398

330 seed on the ground to propitiate deity, with the manner in which animals deport themselves, with the beliefs relating to witches and disembodied spirits, show a marked similarity to beliefs connected with the same by our Southern negroes. Among the latter, if one man has an enmity against another and wishes to accomplish his death, he takes a charmed nail and drives it, every day a little, into a tree. When it touches the heart of the tree the doomed individual falls dead.

This would seem to be a remnant of the ancient faith in the supernatural attributes of trees, or of tree worship.—The African chief is said to trace a line of ashes round his hut to protect it against evil spirits. The Afro-American sprinkles mustard seed before his stable door to keep out the witch, claiming that she cannot enter until every seed has been picked up, and so the dawn will come before her work is accomplished. To the African the hooting of an owl means that the Angel of Death is stealing silently through the cluster of huts to select a victim, our Africans consider it always the forerunner of death or some other great evil.

As a charm against an enemy's spear, the Africans tie around the waist a thin fibre, cover it with a cloth, put a nut in the mouth and knife in the left hand. This is quite suggestive of the directions given a little later for using the Devil's shoestring. This Devil's shoestring also recalls a medicine used by the Africans to render themselves invincible. Our Negroes and the Africans have almost identical beliefs regarding the passing of the souls of the dead into the bodies of lower animals.

Old Uncle Simon Hollowfield told me very gravely of several different rabbits into whose bodies had passed "de sperits" of certain individuals who were dead, one of these rabbits contained the spirit of his old mistress and guarded her grave. It has been proven that the same legends and superstitions obtain all over the South; though the stories may have many variants, the divergencies are unimportant and do not detract from their weight as testimony establishing the fact that they all came over in the slave ships from the old to the new country.

Mr. Joel Chandler Harris found a legend current among Georgia negroes to be identical with one told by a descendant