Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/466

Old Woman who lived in the Shoe). Then the father of the crowd of children said,—"It will be some one enticing our fowls away, look beneath." They looked beneath, and it was an old man. They said to their father,—"It is an old man." "Ask him if he can watch fowls," he said, and they asked him. "Can't watch fowls," he replied. "Ask him,—can he drive off birds from the crops?" "Of course I can drive off birds," he replied. So they took him away to the field. Every day the youngest son used to carry him rice wrapped up in a leaf The old man said to him,—"Please always play your flute up on the hill over there." Till he heard the flute Thlang-pa-saisira used to take off the old man's skin, but put it on in a hurry when he heard the flute. One day the boy looked secretly before he played, and saw the old man without his skin, and behold! it was a very beautiful young man. The boy went back a little, and came playing. When he got home he told his father privately, and his father said,—"Let us make zu (rice beer). Let us soothe his spirit with a sacrifice." (Here we get a glimpse into the working of the Lushai mind. The father concluded that the strange state of the old man must be due to his having been bewitched, and at once prepared to make an offering to the demon, which he considered the cause of the trouble, in hopes of effecting the release of the sufferer. His reasons we shall see were not entirely disinterested.) "When his daughters were carrying up water in zu-pots, their father said,—"If you will not marry the old man in our house it will be the worse for you." Then they did not wish to marry the old man, and he threw down their brass zu-pots from their shoulders, and smashed them into pieces. Then the youngest one said,—"If all our pots are to be broken like this, as for marrying him, I will marry him, why not?" Their father was very pleased, and said,—"You are a very wise girl." Presently they made zu for the soothing of the old man's spirit. Then they said to the old man,—"Come, strip off your