Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/112
TOO The Pre-Bitddhist Religion of the Burmese.
I have several times entered a village and found the houses surrounded with white thread, to which were attached Buddhist texts or leaves of the sacred eugenia, also em- ployed in the Buddhist ceremony of initiation in the monk- hood. This was with the idea of preventing the cholera demon from entering during an epidemic. More practical was a custom which I witnessed in Akyab in 1891 of segregating a whole quarter of the town by means of a rope over which townsmen stood as guards, no one being allowed to pass in or out. I was told then that many years before a European Inspector of Police roughly insisted on passing the cordon, and was cut down and killed.
Death and burial. — The subject of death and burial has been so fully treated in the last chapter of The Burman,^ to which my notes in Man for February 1916 may be regarded as a supplement, that it is unnecessary to deal with it here.
1 The Bur man, by Shway Yoe (Sir George Scott), 1882.
