OR TAKSETO. 



30 



by a relative, who had come to take him home, and that this rela- 

 tive was the first to tell one of the villagers of the cause of the 

 madness. By the next morning the report had spread through the 

 village like wildfire, magnified and ornamented with the additions 

 we have given above. The villagers themselves were, however, 

 loth to believe the truth, when we told it to them, denuded of the 

 additions they had made to it. The relative of the madman told us, 

 a few days afterwards, the cause of the madman's misfortune; he 

 described to us, how the man had endeavoured to make Madana 

 Tayiley, about a year ago, and had been frightened by demons 

 just at the moment of the oil becoming perfected, and how he, 

 in consequence, had become a maniac. Although Madana Yak- 

 seniyo and their wonderful oil are matters, about which we and this 

 relative of the madman essentially differ in opinion from each other, 

 yet, as to the mere fact of the man having become mad on such an 

 occasion, we do not differ at all; for considering the extent of 

 superstitious fear, which is ever present in the mind of an ignorant 

 Singhalese, and especially on such an occasion, as that of preparing 

 the oil of the demons, in the dead of night, on a lonesome grave, 

 in a lonely part of the village, and his belief in the presence, at the 

 scene of his operations, of cruel and powerful demons, whom he 

 himself has but just invoked, and that these demons are ready at 

 any unguarded moment, during the process of making the oil, to 

 pounce upon him and destroy him and his oil — when we consider 

 these things, it is not at all improbable that a Singhalese, through 

 mere excess of fright and an overexcited imagination, should lose 

 his reason and become a maniac. 



XL Morottoo Yak a, or Demon of Morottoo > or Rata Yak a 

 or Foreign demon, is so named from his being a foreigner who 

 landed at Morottoo, when he first came over into this country from 

 the Malabar Coast. Soon after his landing, he fixed his residence 

 on the top of a large tree in the neighbourhood of Morottoo, and 

 whilst living there he brought so much sickness upon men, and 

 especially upon children and women in a state of pregnancy, that 

 the whole district was said to have been filled with mourning during 



F 



