James George Frazer

“ Or they pray to a ghostly woman named Lâne, saying, "In all places of the neighbourhood shake the betel-nuts from the palms, that they may fall down to me on this fruit-tree and knock the berries from the boughs!" But by the betel-nuts the fowler in veiled language means the birds, which are to come in flocks to the fruit-tree and be caught fast by the lime on the branches. Again, when a fisherman wishes to catch eels, he prays to two ghosts called Yambi and Ngigwâli, saying: "Come, ye two men, and go down into the holes of the pool ”

“ Next morning the women of the town sweep out their houses and hearths and deposit the sweepings on broken wooden plates. Many wrap themselves in torn mats and tattered clothes; others swathe themselves in grass and creepers. While they do so, they pray, saying, “All ye sicknesses that are in our body and plague us, we are come to-day to throw you out.” When they start to do so, the priest gives orders that everybody is to scream once and at the same time to smite his mouth. In a moment they all scream, smite their mouths, and run as fast as they can in the direction of Mount Adaklu. ”

“ The Ashantees celebrate the festival of the new yams early in September; until it is over none of the people may taste of the new yams. “The Yam Custom,” we are told, “is like the Saturnalia; neither theft, intrigue, nor assault are punishable during the continuance, but the grossest liberty prevails, and each sex abandons itself to its passions.” An eye-witness has described the scene at Coomassie, the capital: “The next morning the King ordered a large quantity of rum to be poured into brass pans, in various parts of the town; the crowd pressing around, and drinking like hogs ”

“ So curiously does it often happen that the savage reaches the goal of his wishes by a road which to civilized man might appear at first sight to lead far away from it.
Annual expulsion of embodied evils among the Hos of Togoland. Before the Hos of Togoland, to the west of Dahomey, celebrate their festival of the new yams, which has been described in another part of this work,510 they say that it is necessary to clean the town and to put it in order. ”

“ And if there is illness in the village, the eldest son lauds him with the laud-giving names which he gained when fighting with the enemy, and at the same time lauds all the other Amatongo; the son reproves the father, saying, ‘We for our parts may just die. Who are you looking after? Let us die all of us, that we may see into whose house you will enter.475 You will eat grasshoppers; you will no longer be [pg 185] invited to go anywhere, if you destroy your own village.’ After that, because they have worshipped him, they take courage saying, ‘He has heard ”

“ We may suppose that the deeply rooted beliefs of the savage in the fatal effects of marriage between certain classes of persons, whether relations by blood or connexions by marriage, gradually spread in his mind so as to embrace the relations between men and men as well as between men and women; till he had worked himself into the conviction that to see or touch his father-in-law, for example, was nearly or quite as dangerous as to touch or have improper relations with his mother-in-law. ”

“ Johnson, Bishop James, on human scapegoats among the Yorubas, ix. 211 sq.
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, in the Highlands, i. 368;
touched for scrofula by Queen Anne, i. 370;
on Highland custom of beating a man in a cow's hide, viii. 322
Johnston, Sir H. H., on the diffusion of round huts in Africa, ii. 227 n. 3;
on eunuch priests on the Congo, v. 271 n.
Johnstone, Rev. A., on Hallowe'en fires in Buchan, x. 233
Jokumara, a rain-god in Southern India, his effigy used in a rain-making ceremony, i. ”

“ The weakness of his condition made anything impossible beyond literally riding with him in his arms back again to camp. The boy's clothes were torn and dirty and his flesh was bleeding, but his delicate Southern beauty was none the less strongly in evidence.
Frazer remembered the interest and assistance of his comrades. They had hovered in the silence of men's earnestness until the boy was able to make himself coherent. ”

“ I knew that girl—his wife—in Frisco. She’s a cousin of mine, she is—she was—I thought once of—. This thing’s a personal matter of mine—an’ that money he got away with, that five thousand, belongs to me by rights. Oh, never mind, I’m going along. Do you hear?” he shouted, his fists raised, “I’m going along, I tell you. There ain’t a man of you big enough to stop me. Let’s see you try and stop me going. Let’s see you once, any two of you.” He filled the barroom with his clamor.
“Lord love you, come along, then,” said the sheriff.
The posse rode out of Keeler that same night. ”

“ Gubernatis, "Usi funebri," p. 47; Lammert, "Volksmedezin," pp. 103, 105, 106. ↑ Dyer, "English Folk-lore," p. 230; Brand, "Popular Antiquities," ii, p. 231. ↑ Yule on Marco Polo, i, p. 188; Crantz, "Greenland," i, p. 237; ' Tylor, "Prim. Cult.," ii, p. 26 ”

“ Frazer held himself aloof from the movement of the growing towns and cities, and watched the weak physical fiber of his children, marked by their unambitious Southern strain. Energy for acquirement of any sort was not theirs, and for his family his money meant only the material supply of food and clothes. ”

“ His extravagant affection for Frazer made a shadow the only simile of his constant presence with him. The boy's nervous timidity and gentleness had found its chief outlet in the watchfullest care of him and the things he cared for. He had seemed wholly lacking in the lore of his class regarding life in the open. He had never gone among the horses or cared to use a gun, but had taken upon himself the cooking and domestic duties of camp life. ”

“ Turner, "Samoa," p. 150; C. Wachsmuth, "Das Alte Griechenland im neuem," p. 113; Hahn, "Albanesische Studien," p. 152; Monier Williams, "Religious Thought and Life in India," p. 300; Gray, "China," i, p. 295. Compare Doolittle, "Social Life of the Chinese," p. 164; Apuleius, "Metam.,"i, c. 6; Brent, "The Cyclades," pp. 223, 224; Servius on Virgil, "Æn.," vi, 366. ↑ For evidence see Tylor's "Early History of Mankind," p. 116 sqq. ↑ Plutarch, "Rom. Quæst.," v. ”

“ It had seemed a simple thing to promise to keep him with him, and Frazer had gone to sleep in the very midst of the passionate little torrent of Mexican gratitude.
In the excitement of his early months in California the boy had seemed vastly a nuisance in transportation. Frazer had stayed only long enough in San Francisco to acquire an outfit and vocabulary, and hurried off to the southern mines. The boy rode closely by his side, indifferent to fatigue, his cheerfulness clouded by the fear that he might be overlooked and left behind. ”

“ FRAZER, ANDREW (d. 1792) , lieutenant-colonel of engineers, son of George Frazer, a deputy surveyor of excise in Scotland, was probably employed on the works at Fort George after the Scottish rebellion of 1745–6. He was appointed practitioner engineer, with rank of ensign in the train, on 17 March 1759, and sub-engineer, with rank of lieutenant, in 1761. ”

“ In a mountain is a pond, on the pond swims a duck, in the duck is an egg, in the egg burns a light, that light is my life. If you could put out that light, my life would be at an end. But that can never, never be." However, the young man got hold of the egg, smashed it, and put out the light, and with it the witch's life went out also. In a German story a cannibal called Body without Soul or Soulless keeps his soul in a box, which stands on a rock in the middle of the Red Sea. A soldier gets possession of the box and goes with it to Soulless, who begs the soldier to give him back his soul. ”

“ For long ages, according to Frazer, man acted on that belief, and only eventually did he discover that magic did not always act. This discovery set him thinking and led him to the inference that at work in the world there must be supernatural powers or beings, that the course of nature and of human life is controlled by personal beings superior to man. And that inference, according to Sir James Frazer's definition, constitutes religion. ”

“ Marcus did not stop even to remove the saddle. He arrived in the barroom of the hotel in Keeler just after the posse had been made up. The sheriff, who had come down from Independence that morning, at first refused his offer of assistance. He had enough men already—too many, in fact. The country traveled through would be hard, [227] and it would be difficult to find water for so many men and horses.
“But none of you fellers have ever seen um,” vociferated Marcus, quivering with excitement and wrath. “I know um well. I could pick um out in a million. I can identify um, and you fellers can’t. ”

“ Their new homes have not the historical charm of the old, but wherever the Frasers have gone, away from the home of their fathers, they have acquitted themselves well. A scion of a Stratherrick house was James George Fraser, who many years ago settled at Galt, Ontario. Like his brother Capt. Charles Fraser, now residing in Glasgow, Scotland, he was attached to a Highland regiment in his younger days, but withdrawing from the service, he came to Canada with his young wife, Christina MacLeod. ”

“ He sleeps all along on the down turn. It’s the up turn that gets him.”
“Mr. Jansen,” said I, “all that may be true; but suppose the bucket should catch and drop us out?”
“Well, sometimes it catches; but nobody’s been hurt bad yet; one man fell fifteen feet perpendicular. He lit on the top of his head.”
“Wasn’t he killed?”
“No; he was only stunned a little. There was a buzzing about among his brains for a few days after; he’s at work down below now, as well as ever.”
“Mr. Jansen, upon the whole I think I’d rather go down by the ladder, if it’s all the same to you.” ”

“ Frazer’s mastery of the whole literature of folk-lore and savage life is something remarkable, and is clearly based on a thorough and systematic search through all likely sources (the Dutch reports on their Eastern possessions are a quite unworked field) . One quite envies Mr. Frazer the hours of happy work which must have been passed in compiling this mass of information. He must often have felt the supreme joy of the researcher in finding his chaotic materials slowly rounding themselves into an intelligible whole. ”

“ But still if ye don’t think yer a-pullin’ fast enough take yer lick, fur in such a race as this is likely to be, a man should follow his own notions and act accordin’ to his gifts.”
“Do you think we will win, old trapper?” asked Fred. “I dunno, boy, I sartinly dunno, but I don’t like yer oars, especially that left one. There’s a kink in the shank of it that hadn’t orter be there.” ”

“ Marcus ground his teeth.
“Done for,” he muttered; “done for.”
“I never was so thirsty,” continued McTeague. “I’m that dry I can hear my tongue rubbing against the roof of my mouth.”
“Well, we can’t stop here,” said Marcus, finally; “we got to go somewhere. We’ll try and get back, but it ain’t no manner of use. Anything we want to take along with us from the mule? We can—”
Suddenly he paused. In an instant the eyes of the two doomed men had met as the same thought simultaneously rose in their minds. The canvas sack with its five thousand dollars was still tied to the horn of the saddle. ”

“ So the horses ran to the foot of the copper rock, opened the black chest, and brought back the golden casket. Then the piebald horse turned himself into a bald-headed man, opened the golden casket, and cut off the heads of the seven birds. So the Swan-woman died. In another Tartar poem the hero, pursuing his sister who has driven away his cattle, is warned to desist from the pursuit because his sister has carried away his soul in a golden sword and a golden arrow, and if he pursues her she will kill him by throwing the golden sword or shooting the golden arrow at him. ”

“ A rat could not hide on the surface of that glistening alkali, and besides, all McTeague’s store of provisions and his priceless supply of water were on the mule. Marcus ran after the mule, revolver in hand, shouting and cursing. But the mule would not be caught. He acted as if possessed, squealing, lashing out, and galloping in wide circles, his head high in the air.
“Come on,” shouted Marcus, furious, turning back to McTeague. “Come on, help me catch him. We got to catch him. All the water we got is on the saddle.” ”

“ Fraser flared up, "you can just lay a bet on that. But these Siwashes won't stand the gaff, they're too wise; so I've got to, ain't I?" He glared belligerently from one to the other.
"Can you handle a boat?" demanded Big George.
"Can I handle a—Hunh!" sniffed the fellow. "Say, just because you've got corns on your palms as big as pancakes, you needn't think you're the only human that ever pulled an oar. I was the first man through Miles Canon. During the big rush in '98 I ran the rapids for a living. I got fifty dollars a trip, and it only took me three minutes by the watch. ”

“ Marcus ran on, firing as he went. The mule, one foreleg trailing, scrambled along, squealing and snorting. Marcus fired his last shot. The mule pitched forward upon his head, then, rolling sideways, fell upon the canteen, bursting it open and spilling its entire contents into the sand.
Marcus and McTeague ran up, and Marcus snatched the battered canteen from under the reeking, bloody hide. There was no water left. Marcus flung the canteen from him and stood up, facing McTeague. There was a pause.
“We’re dead men,” said Marcus. ”