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1865. ] Religion &c. among the Karens. 209 
soon after marriage, 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 arat. 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 
