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little boy returning and entering the brook. It was a black Hao!" 

 In the Sheu slien heu ki ^ we read about a kiao, who in the 

 shape of a man, about twenty years old, came to a farmer's 

 cottage. He rode on a white horse, under a state umbrella, and 

 was escorted by four followers, all dressed in yellow robes. "They 

 came from the East and arriving at the gate they called : 'Child 

 of Yin (the little son of the farmer, thirteen years old, who was 

 alone at home), we come to sit down for a little while and rest'. 

 Thus they entered the house and sat down on a couch in the 

 lower part of the court-yard. One of them grasped the umbrella 

 and turned it upside down. Yin's child looked at their clothes 

 and saw that they were entirely without a seam. The horse was 

 spotted with five colours and looked as if it had a scaly armour 

 and no hair. In a moment a rainy vapour came, whereupon the 

 man mounted the horse and rode away. Turning and looking 

 back he said to the child: 'Tomorrow I must come again'. Yin's 

 child looked where they went and saw them treading the air, 

 turning westwards and gradually ascending. In a moment cloudy 

 vapours assembled from all sides and the daylight was darkened 

 by them. The next day a heavy rain came violently down; the 

 water gushed over mountains and valleys, hills and ravines were 

 overflown. When it was about to overflow the cottage of Yin's 

 child he suddenly saw a big kiao, over three chang long. Which 

 with its windings protectingly covered the cottage". 



The revenge of a kiao, transformed into a girl, is told in the 

 / yuen ^. A man who had hit a kiao with an arrow met a crying 

 girl with the same arrow in her hand. When he asked her what 

 this meant, she said that she came to return to him the burning 

 pain it had caused her, after which she gave him the arrow and 

 disappeared. Before he reached his house he got a hot fever and 

 died on the road. 



The passages mentioned above clearly show that the kiao, 

 just as the lung, were believed to assume human shapes and to 

 cause rain and thunderstorm. This is not astonishing, for we 

 have seen that the Mao were called lung themselves. 



1 :^ II ^ IE, written by Ts'ao Ts'ien, |^ *J^, in the fifth century. Ch. X, 

 p. i. The Sheu shen ki, ^ f| IE' ^^^ written by ¥u Pao, ^ ^, (orKANPAO, 



-=p ^ ) in the first decades of the fourth century. 



2 J^ ^ , -written by Liu King-shuh, ^J ^ ;|^ i in t^^e first half of the fifth 

 century; quoted T. S., 1.1., Ch. 132, ^f»|i|, V- 2&. 



Verh. Kon. Akad. v. Wetensoh. (Afd. letterk.) N. R. Dl. XIII, N" 2. 6 



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