Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/406

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398
Folk-lore Miscellanea.

out again. Envious woman had her killed, and ate her liver. At length she is restored, and marries her prince (Mirzapur).
734. Tasks of the Witch Queen. The witch maligns a young queen, and, after many misfortunes have befallen the young queen, her son learns that the witch's life rests in a parrot, which he kills.


Ethnology. — 651. (Goat-butchers will not kill cows, and vice versâ.)
654. Montgomery — Ioya Tribe, "Ioí means a wife, and it would seem as if the tribe got its name from no one knowing who their male ancestor was."
648, 705. Physical differences between Europeans and Asiatics worked out in great detail. The writer holds that " in using force, even to the most trifling matter, the European appears to depend chiefly on his extensoral development, and the Asiatic on his flexoral.

W. H. D. Rouse.

______

The Sin-Eater. — In his work on Turkestân,[1] Dr. Schuyler speaks of a custom existing in that country which is worth noting in connection with Mr. Sidney Hartland's paper on this subject in the June number of Folk-Lore, 1892. "Life in Ach Kûrgân", Dr. S. says, "was rather dull, amusement there was none, all games being strictly forbidden. Such things as jugglery, dancing, and comic performances are, I am told, forbidden in the Kanate, the licentious Khan having seen the error of his ways, and having put on, for his people at least, the semblance of virtue. Of praying there was very little ; occasionally in the afternoon at sunset some few pious individuals would spread out a rug and make their supplications to Allah. One poor old man, however, I noticed, who seemed constantly engaged in prayer. On calling attention to him, I was told that he was an iskachi, a person who makes his living by taking upon himself the sins of the dead, and thenceforward devoting his life to prayer for their souls. He corresponds to the sin-eater of the Welsh border."

In Kashmir, on the borders of Central Asia, where the present writer now is, it is the living, apparently, who need a sin-eater.

We have just passed through a terrible visitation of cholera ; when the outbreak was at its worst, the deaths in the native city rose to nearly three hundred daily. An order then came from the Maharaja (who was at Jamu, his second capital[2]) that a couple or more bulls

  1. Vol. ii, p. 28.
  2. The chief town of a fief belonging to the Maharaja of Kashmir's progenitors for two or more generations before Kashmir was given over to that family.