tly similar, the earth having acquired the quality of
swiftness by the rapid transit on the wheel. If three boys or three
girls have been born to a woman, they think that the fourth should
be of the same sex, in order to make up two pairs. A boy or girl
born after three of the opposite sex is called Titra or Titri, and is
considered very unlucky. To avert this misfortune they cover the child
with a basket, kindle a fire of grass all round it, and smash a brass
pot on the floor. Then they say that the baby is the fifth and not
the fourth child, and the evil is thus removed. When one woman gives
birth to a male and another to a female child in the same quarter of
a village on the same day and they are attended by the same midwife,
it is thought that the boy child will fall ill from the contagion
of the girl child communicated through the midwife. To avoid this,
on the following Sunday the child's maternal uncle makes a banghy,
which is carried across the shoulders like a large pair of scales,
and weighs the child in it against cowdung. He then takes the banghy
and deposits it at cross-roads outside the village. The father cannot
see either the child or its mother till after the Chathi or sixth-day
ceremony of purification, when the mother is bathed and dressed in
clean clothes, the males of the family are shaved, all their clothes
are washed, and the house is whitewashed; the child is also named on
this day. The mother cannot go out of doors until after the Barhi or
twelfth-day ceremony. If a child is born at an unlucky astrological
period its ears are pierced in the fifth month after birth as a means
of protection.

11. Funeral rites. Bringing back the soul.

The dead are either buried or burnt. When a man is dying they put
basil leaves and boiled rice and milk in his mouth, and a little
piece of gold, or if they have not got gold they put a rupee in his
mouth and take it out again. For ten days after a death, food in
a leaf-cup and a lamp are set out in the house-yard every evening,
and every morning water and a tooth-stick. On the tenth day they are
taken away and consigned to a river. In Chhattisgarh on the third
day after death the soul is brought back. The women put a lamp on a
red earthen pot and go to a tank or stream at night. The fish are
attracted towards the light, and one of them is caught and put in
the pot, which is then filled with water. It is brought home and set
beside a small heap of flour, and