DRINK-OFFERING ENSURES BIG CREELS 467 



deep and hold in willing peonage a piscatorial power all his 

 own.i 



This djin of the water was both recognisant and static — 

 no twelve-day banquets speeded him to Ethiopia — and far 

 more instant in service than Hermes or Aphrodite, as Heliodorus 

 and other epigrammatists plainly prove. Not infrequent 

 must have been the occasions when Greek and Roman fisher- 

 men returning, despite their sacrificial offerings, with empty 

 creels, met the taunt, 



" They're gods : perchance they sleep, 

 Cry out, and know what prayers are worth, 

 Thou dust and earth." 



Had the fishermen of the Dodekanese and of Italy, following 

 the example of Hsii, poured oblations of the wine of the islands, 

 or deprompted the old Falernian, perhaps the deities of their 

 craft, who oft-times must have jibbed at repeated hecatombs of 

 fish, even if " spiced," and at the sight of the Olympian box- 

 rooms littered with cobbled cobles and torn tackle, would 

 have been more regular in attendance and more prompt in 

 aid. 



The story runs that " every night, when Hsu fared forth to 

 fish, he would carry some wine with him, and drink and fish 

 by turns, always taking care to pour out a libation on the 

 ground, accompanied by the invocation, ' Drink, too, ye 

 drowned spirits of the River ! ' Such was his regular custom : 

 and it was noticeable that, even on occasions when others 

 caught naught, he always got a full basket." 



The means by which this success was attained and other 

 pleasant details are set forth fully in that delightful book by 

 Professor Giles, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio.'^ Suffice 

 it, however, here to recount that one drowned Spirit of the 

 River, the genius of Hsii's beat, touched, perhaps even affected, 

 by the alcoholic libation, at first invisibly, afterwards openly 



1 In Chuang Tzil (translated by Professor Legge, and also by Professor 

 Giles) a good deal about fishermen, but very little technical can be read. 



2 Second edition (London, 1909), p. 390. Then on p. 250 there is a weird 

 story of the goblins who ate the bodies of nineteen men drowned in the river, 

 but spared the father of Wang Shih-hsiu, because he was a skilled drop- 

 kicker in the football matches played on a mat in the middle of Lake Tung- 

 t'ing. The ball was a fish's bladder ! 



