Notebooks and MSS.
May I suggest to members that it would be an excellent thing if, in default of a qualified individual legatee, they left to the Society such notebooks and MSS. as they may die possessed of? Every member of the Society who devotes any attention to folklore probably accumulates far more than he is ever likely to use. It would be an easy matter to publish an annual index of these additions to the library which might well be of great value to members; the MS. collections could be edited for publication if large, or issued in the Transactions if small.
I don't know if other members, like myself, interleave and annotate the works they use most often. May I also suggest that the real value of such books would be best appreciated if they, like the notebooks, found a home finally in the Society's library?
Feathers and Rain.
In the Bohemian village of Metschin, the body of the schoolmaster, who was buried early in May amid many marks of respect from the inhabitants, is to be exhumed. There, as elsewhere, a great drought prevails, and the story has got about that a cushion with feathers was put under his head. Nine-tenths of the population believe that this is the cause of the drought, hence the proposal to exhume him and remove the cushion, which is in reality filled with hay.
Is this case parallel to the prejudice against the feathers of certain birds in beds and pillows, or is there some special connection between feathers and rain? More particularly in Australia feathers and hair are associated with rain-making. Golden Bough, i. 20; Globus, xxxi. 272; Salvado, Memoire sur l'Australie, 260.
[Our thanks are due to Miss Braitmaier for the original drawings of gable ornaments reproduced on Plate VI. See p. 322.— Ed.].
