Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/369

6. Miscellaneous.

To break a mirror means serious ill-luck.^[1]

If a sick person wants to be moved to another bed or another room, he will die. Apparently, however, if he is moved without asking for it, to make the bed or the like, this is not necessarily fatal.

If two people wipe their hands on the same towel at the same time, they will quarrel (se choquer).^[2]

To get a black streak on one's face from the stove or elsewhere portends a gift.

E. H. and H. J. Rose.

1. Briser un glace est un présage de malheur ou tout au moins de mauvaise chance. (Paris et plusieurs provinces.)
2. Deux personnes qui s'essuient à la même serviette sont exposés à se quereller. (Superstition assez répandue.)

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Marriage and Birth on the Lower Congo.

The following notes are additions to those already published in Folk-Lore^[1] concerning marriage and birth on the Lower Congo.

Clanship and marriage.—When a slave woman belonging to one clan is married into another clan, she and her children do not belong to the latter clan, for, it is said, "The clan name is not sold with the fee paid for the woman." At any time the children can return to their mother's owner's clan, and take up their privileges of clanship. Such children are called ana akwa Kinlaza, (Kinlaza being the name of a clan); children born of a free woman of the Kinlaza clan are called esi Kinlaza. Just as a free-woiman's children belong to her brother, so a slave-woman's children, (when she is married and not sold), belong to her master, who in this way occupies in regard to her the same position as the brother to the free woman.

Betrothal custom.—The appropriation of a female infant as a future wife by dropping a bead into a saucepan has already been

1. Vol. xix., pp. 410-5, 418-23, 430-1; vol. xx., pp. 309-11, 477-9; vol. xxi., pp. 463-5, 467.