1865.] Religion &c. among the Karens. 209 



soon after mairiage, she was seized with an intense longing for glitter- 

 ing fruit." He brought her all the fruits he could find, but none 

 were of the right kind ; and she sent him off to her mother, who 

 lived in another village to ask her for some. Her mother said she 

 knew what her daughter wanted, and told her son-in-law to go and 

 visit the neighbours till she procured some for her. The old woman 

 then went to pounding rice in a mortar before the house, when the 

 children, who were playing around, came up, peered down into the 

 mortar and said : " Grandmother, what are you pounding here ?" and 

 as each one looked down into the mortar, an eye dropped in, and the 

 children were suddenly struck blind. After she had thus obtained a 

 sufficient quantity, she gathered them up, put them into a hollow 

 bamboo, and sent them to her daughter by her son-in-law, with the 

 charge that he should not unstopper it and look in by the way. He 

 did, however, when half way home, pull out the cork and look in, 

 when he saw the eyes rolling about, and some of them jumped out, 

 of the bamboo ; and the eyes of the children that escaped were 

 restored to sight again. Those that remained he carried to his wife, 

 who devoured them with great relish. 



Human beings often appear to a person possessed of a Na as rats, 

 and are devoured as such. In one story a man is represented as 

 going to the field, followed by his child, and on reaching the foot of a 

 large tree, the power of the Na came upon him and he devoured his 

 little boy, thinking him to be a rat. He then returned to his house, 

 and brought back with him his other child, which he devoured in the 

 same place that he had eaten up its brother. He next went and 

 brought the mother to the scene of his former barbarities, but left her 

 there a little while to look for a club to kill her. In the interval, a 

 lizard in the tree that had witnessed the death of the children, told 

 her what had occurred, and drew her up the tree out of her husband's 

 reach. When he returned, and could not get at his wife, he was so 

 enraged that he began to devour his own flesh, and eat up his arms 

 and legs close to the body. 



A person possessed of a Na has the power to take the form of 

 another. In one story, an old man asks his nephew in the morning, 

 why he came and shampooed him so severely during the night. The 

 nephew declared he had not been near him, and gave his uncle a sword 



