TRANSFORMATION 163 



manifestly a relic of a belief similar to that re- 

 corded in the foregoing tales and superstitions. If 

 a farmer have several times a foal or calf die, 

 he buries one of them in the garden, planting a 

 young willow in its mouth. When the tree grows 

 up it is never polled or lopped, but is allowed 

 to grow its own way, and is believed to guard 

 the farm from future casualties of the same kind. 1 

 The meaning of this practice can hardly be better 

 illustrated than by a Kaffir custom. Among some 

 tribes of Kaffirs when twins are born they are examined, 

 and the one appearing the more delicate is suffocated 

 by placing a clod of earth in its mouth. When dead 

 it is buried near the doorway of the hut, and a dwarf 

 aloe is planted over the grave. " The aloe is regarded 

 in some way as the living representative of the dead 

 infant ; its spirit or shade is supposed to be in it, or to 

 be hovering about it. When it is planted its spines 

 are carefully cut away, that the survivor may play 

 about it and drag himself up by it and make himself 



1 Grimm, Teut. Myth. 1 8 1 1 . The following are perhaps trace- 

 able to the same idea ; but they are too doubtful to record in the 

 text : " In Derbyshire, when cattle, such as horses and cows, die, 

 it is usual to bury them under fruit-bearing trees in the orchard " 

 (Addy, 132). In the sixteenth century it was believed in France 

 that a dead dog or other carrion buried at the foot of a tree which 

 had lost its vigour would restore it; and the same property is 

 attributed to a dead cat (Sebillot, F. L. France, iii. 377). A 

 Sicilian mdrchen speaks with a less uncertain voice. The hero 

 having won the king's daughter by the performance of a ploughing 

 task with the help of a magical ox, the ox is killed by his own 

 directions for the marriage-feast, and its bones are buried in the 

 newly prepared land, except one leg which is put under the pillows 

 of the bridal bed. The bride dreams of fruit, awakes and plucks it. 

 The field where the bones are buried is found full of all 'softs of 

 fruit-trees, laden with fruit (Pitre, Blbl. iv. 243). Here the fruit is 

 clearly the magical ox in a new manifestation. 



