Page:Primitive Culture Vol 1.djvu/511

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setting a man's property adrift for use in the next world, and even go so far as to lay out his valuables by the bier, but in fact they only commit to the frail canoe a few old things not worth plundering.[1] So in North America, the funeral sacrifice of the Winnebagos has come down to burying a pipe and tobacco with the dead, and sometimes a club in a warrior's grave, while the goods brought and hung up at the burial-place are no longer left there, but the survivors gamble for them.[2] The Santals of Bengal put two vessels, one for rice and the other for water, on the dead man's couch, with a few rupees, to enable him to appease the demons on the threshold of the shadowy world, but when the funeral pile is ready these things are removed.[3] The fanciful art of replacing costly offerings by worthless imitations is at this day worked out into the quaintest devices in China. As the men and horses dispatched by fire for the service of the dead are but paper figures, so offerings of clothes and money may be represented likewise. The imitations of Spanish pillar-dollars in pasteboard covered with tinfoil, the sheets of tinfoil-paper which stand for silver money, and if coloured yellow for gold, are consumed in such quantities that the sham becomes a serious reality, for the manufacture of mock-money is the trade of thousands of women and children in a Chinese city. In a similar way trunks full of property are forwarded in the care of the newly deceased, to friends who are gone before. Pretty paper houses, 'replete with every luxury,' as our auctioneers say, are burnt for the dead Chinaman to live in hereafter, and the paper keys are burnt also, that he may unfasten the paper locks of the paper chests that hold the ingots of gold-paper and silver-paper, which are to be realized as current gold and silver in the other world, an idea which, however, does not prevent the careful survivors from

  1. St. John, Far East,' vol. i. pp. 54, 68. Compare Bosman, 'Guinea,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 430.
  2. Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part iv. p. 54.
  3. Hunter, 'Rural Bengal,' p. 210.