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was not there. When she saw Pee Bee Yaw she was jealous, supposing her to be her husband's paramour.

The young bride attacked her rival fiercely with a club, and beat her over the whole field. Pee Bee Yaw, vainly attempting to escape, jumped into a crab's hole, and has never been seen since.

This amusing little story keeps the people in good humour at their toil, and is recited with great gusto at the harvest-home.

The Karens to this day use the sort of well-curb of earth thrown out by a crab about the mouth of its hole, as the representative of Pee Bee Yaw. This lump of earth is placed on the threshing-floor at harvest, and offerings are made to it. During the rest of the year it is kept in the paddy-bin with the greatest care, while fowls are sacrificed to it, and a small portion is nibbled off and cast out into the field, just before certain rhymed incantations are made, which are supposed to be necessary to the welfare of the grain. To this day the hill

Karen will never cultivate land near his house. Pee Bee Yaw hates women, owing to the beating she received, and no risk must be run of her meeting a woman and deserting her post in anger.

The hill Karen always stores his paddy far away

from his house, because it is Pee Bee Yaw's gift, and he dares not let her know that he feeds his women with it. Each day's supply of paddy must be cleaned as soon as brought home. Pee Bee Yaw is supposed not to recognize in the white rice. the yellow paddy she gave.

CHAPTER V.

THEIR FOLK-LORE: ONE OF THEIR SATIRICAL TRADITIONS.

STORY OF SAW KAY.

AT Mya-yah-doung (about ten miles east of the present station of Wah-net-khyoung, on the Prome road) there once lived a great Karen chief called the Yellow Chief. He had a son named Saw Kay (Mr. Crooked). He was a cunning, idle, and lazy fellow. The Burmese Government seized on the entire clan, and sent them under guard to cut a huge teak tree into a war-boat and drag it to the river-bank. Saw Kay was the only male not seized. He was spared to carry the rice the women were forced to clean out for the food of the working party. Saw Kay's mother had two large and very fat hogs, which she had petted so long that she could not bear to have them killed. Saw Kay's mouth watered every time he looked at their fat

sides, and as his entreaties to be allowed to kill the hogs were in vain, he laid a plan to induce his mother to gratify his appetite for pork.

He went to his father, and with a profuse gush of tears told him that his mother was dead, sobbed out a pitiful tale of how his mother had been seized by cholera, and had died alone, deserted by all the women of the clan, and how he alone had buried the body and performed the funeral rites. Leaving his father under guard, plunged in the depth of woe at this untimely bereavement, he returned to his home, and told his mother that his father, while at his work, had been killed by the boat rolling over on to him. He described the fearful appearance of the corpse, mangled by the crushing weight that had mutilated it beyond recognition, and, beating on his breast, exclaimed against the brutality of the Burman guard, that would not even permit the removal of the corpse to the ancestral burial-place (a terrible thing to Karens).

It must be remembered that Saw Kay was the only means of communication between the working party and their home, and that the lies of Saw Kay ran no risk of detection.

The mother, bathed in tears, said, "Well, he was

a good husband to me, and the least I can do will be to make the usual funeral feast to his memory, even if his bones do not lie with those of his fathers."

So one of the hogs was killed, and Saw Kay gorged himself to repletion. Soon after, he began his plans for a second feast, and went to his father with proposals for a re-marriage. He said, "Father, we shall need some one to cook for us and weave our clothes. Now, I lately saw a woman who looked exactly like mother, talked like her, and acted like her. In fact, if I had not buried mother with my own hands, I should have claimed her as my own mother. Now, you had better marry her. Let me act as the go-between and negociate a marriage."

The father replied, "If she is like your dead mother, it is all I can ask," and consented to the match.

Saw Kay then went to his mother, and told her that as soon as the clan returned from their work they would be driven from the long house in which the entire clan lived, in accordance with the ancestral Karen custom, which banished widows and orphans from the house, lest their misfortune prove contagious. He urged her to a second marriage, saying that he had met a man in the

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