DRINK-OFFERING ENSURES BIG CREELS 467 
deep and hold in willing peonage a piscatorial power all his 
own. 1 
This djin of the water was both recognisant and static— 
no twelve-day banquets speeded dim 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 Hsii 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.2 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 Tz (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- 
ting. The ball was a fish’s bladder | 
