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The Evil Eye, and Allied Notions 169
there met an Italian lady, a Milanese. She was accompanied
by a sweet little child about five or six years of age. For
some days the little one went about attired in a knicker-
bocker suit, and of course was thought to be a boy, until one
day to our amazement it appeared dressed as a girl in a
pretty white muslin frock. On astonishment being expressed
at the transformation, the child's mother said that out of a
large family which she had had, the only survivors were one
grown-up son and this little girl ;
were all girls ; she
those
she had lost between
seemed to think that by disguising the
sex of this one she would in some way divert evil from it.
In India a not uncommon method of disposing of an
enemy is to mix small bits of chopped hair with his food.
This is said to have a must deadly effect, unless an emetic be
speedily given.
The so-called devil-dancers or diviners of Ceylon fabricate
a singular kind of charm, which is supposed to have the effect
of killing an enemy, consisting of a tiny wooden figure of a
man, about eight inches in length. The body of the image is
stuck all over with pins, placed in a small clay coffin, and then
buried. As it decays, so will the person whom it represents
pine away and die.
This, it seems scarcely necessary to state, recalls a custom
known to have been in use in Europe in the Middle Ages,
when waxen figures were made of an enemy, stuck full of
pins, and then exposed to the sun or a fire until the wax
melted. Neapolitans— if they have a spite against any one
administer chopped hair to his dog or his cat. The customs
of the East and the West are mixed up in these cases in a
manner that is, to say the least, very remarkable.
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