20 Hugh Fraser —Folklore from Eastern Gorakhpur. [No. 1, 
from each house in a village went out for 2|- days begging. During that 
time they would not sleep under a roof or eat salt. They generally had a 
drum and went about singing the song of which having lost my notes I 
can only give a fragment. Half the proceeds of begging were give to 
Brahmans and the other half invested in salt and batasa which was eaten 
by the whole village. This form of puja may be used to avert any 
calamity, but in that instance it was to avert danger from snake-bite. I 
could not discover in what quarter the movement originated but it spread 
from village to village and hardly a single village failed to join.] 
No. XIII. Proverb. 
SR, € STIC I 
91? % SR eft Wt[ 5Ff*T % || 
Translation. 
If one cannot get rid of his wealth by having a brahman servant, 
trading in goats, or from an excess of daughters, he will do it by fighting 
with bigger men. 
[A better translation would be, ‘ If you cannot get rid of your wealth 
by having a brahman servant, keeping possession of money received from a 
butcher, &c.’ A chik is a butcher of goats and sheep, but not of oxen, 
and it is considered unlucky to use money received from one. If any such 
happens to be in the house on an otherwise unlucky day, it is put to one 
side, and not touched. The translation of Mr. Fraser is, however, a possible 
one.—Gr. A. G.] 
Notes on dialectic peculiarities. 
No. I. 
This and the following poems are in nearly pure Bhojpuri,—a dialect 
of the Bihari language. Two other dialects of the same language, Maithili 
and Magadhi, will be found referred to below. 
As might be expected, such songs taken down as they are from 
the mouths of ignorant and uncultivated people are seldom correct as 
regards the laws of metre. This is especially the case in the first song, 
which presents several difficulties in the way of scansion. All the lines 
can, it is true, be read after a metric fashion, if the prosodial marks 
given in the text are followed, but this can sometimes only be done 
by altering the usual pronunciation of the words. The fact is that these 
songs were composed for singing, and not for metric recitation, and in 
