Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/147

"Old age being a benefit the Chinese prefer above all things, most people have the grave-clothes cut out and sewed by an unmarried girl or a very young woman, wisely calculating that, whereas such a person is likely to live still a great number of years, a part of her capacity to live still long must surely pass into the clothes, and thus put off for many years the moment when they shall be required for use." We have a somewhat similar idea in the Muhammadan world. In his sixth voyage, Sindbad the Seaman digs his grave for himself in anticipation of death,^[1] so do the Egyptian Musalmâns.^[2] The pilgrim to Mecca wears the Ihrâm or shroud prepared in the event of his decease.^[3] The Calvinistic ideas prevailing in Scotland led to the adoption of the same custom. At her marriage every farmer's wife prepared her shroud, which she kept in her chest of drawers, and aired by spreading it out of doors once a year.^[4] There is, so far as I am aware, no evidence of a similar custom within the Hellenic area. That much importance was paid to the shrouding of the dead is certain. In later Greece it was the special duty of the nearest female relatives of the dead man.^[5] In Homer it was the special prerogative of his parents; the corpse of Patroklos is covered with soft cloth from head to foot, and thereover a white robe.^[6] The dead man, according to Lucian, was shrouded in as handsome a garment as the family could afford, that he might not be cold on the passage to Hades, and that Cerberus might not behold him naked.^[7] It seems to have been a general rule

1. Burton, Arabian Nights (ed. 1893), vol. iv., p. 400 (orig. ed. vol. vi., p. 61).
2. Lane, Modern Egyptians, vol. ii., p. 251.
3. Burton, Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Mecca (ed. 1893), vol. i., p. 139; Scinde, or the Unhappy Valley, vol. ii., p. 200).
4. Rogers, Social Life in Scotland, vol. i., p. 246.
5. Becker, Charicles (English Translation), p. 385.
6. Odyssey, xxiv., 293; Iliad, xviii., 352; Sophocles, Ajax, 903; Euripides, Medea, 1023.
7. Lucian, De Luctu, 10.