62 NOTES ON MALAYAN FOLK-LORE. 
picked to pieces without breaking any of it, the needle will be found, but 
if it is pulled ruthlessly apart, or if even a single piece of the grass of 
which it is made is broken in unravelling it, the golden needle ‘will dis- 
appear. The makers of these curious and beautiful nests are said to 
always choose trees that are infested with red ants or wasps, or which 
vrow in impassable swamps. 
The king crow is called by the Malays the slave of the monkeys, 
burong hamba kra. \t is a pretty, active, noisy little bird, incessantly 
flying about with its two long racket-shaped tail feathers fluttering after 
it. They say that when it has both of these feathers it has paid off its 
debt and is free, but when it is either destitute of these appendages or 
has only one of them it is still in bondage. The grey sea eagle is called 
burong hamba stput, and its office is to give warning by screaming to 
the shell-fish of the changes of the tide, so that they may regulate their 
movements, and those species which crawl about on the mud at low water 
may know when to take refuge in the trees and escape the rising tide, 
or when the tide is falling, that they may know when to descend to look 
for food. 
Burong demam, or the fever bird, is so called from its loud tremulous 
note, and the Malays say that the female bird calls in its fever-stricken 
voice to its mate to go and find food because it has fever so bad that it 
cannot go itself. This bird is probably one of the large green barbets. 
The note is often heard, and doubtless the bird has pean collected, but it 
is one thing shooting a bird and another identifying it as the producer 
of a certain note. 
Another bird, the white-breasted water-hen, a frequenter of the edges 
of reedy pools and the marshy banks of streams, is reputed to build a 
nest on the ground which has the property of rendering any one invisible 
who puts it on his head. The prevailing idea among ‘the Malays is that 
the proper and legitimate use to put it to is to steal money and other 
species of property. 
Elephants are said to be very frightened if they see a tree-stump 
that has been felled at a great height from the ground, as some trees 
which have high spreading buttresses are cut, because they think that 
giants must have felled it, and as ordinary-sized men are more than a 
match for them they are in great dread of being caught by creatures 
many times more powerful than their masters. Some of the larger 
insects of the grasshopper kind are supposed to be objects of terror to 
elephants, while the particularly harmless little pangolin (ants penta- 
dactyla) is thought to be able to kill one of these huge beasts by biting 
its foot. The pangolin, by the bye, is quite toothless. Another method 
in which the pangolin attacks and kills elephants is by coiling itself tightly 
around the end of the elephant’s trunk and so suffocating it. This idea 
is also believed in by the Singhalese, according to Mr. W.T. Hornaday’s 
Two Years in the Fungle. Passing from fiction to fact, a thing that 
does not seem to be generally known, or at least that has not found its 
way into natural history books, may be mentioned here. It is that 
elephants are very fond of eating earth. They methodically dig it out 
with their fore feet, put it into their mouths with their trunks and munch 
