along the banks of Acheron.[1] An Australian or a Karen would have taken in the full significance of the fatal accusation against the Athenian commanders, that they abandoned the bodies of their dead in the sea-fight of Arginousai. The thought is not unknown to Slavonic folk-lore: 'Ha! with the shriek the spirit flutters from the mouth, flies up to the tree, from tree to tree, hither and thither till the dead is burned.'[2] In mediæval Europe the classic stories of ghosts that haunt the living till laid by rites of burial pass here and there into new legends, where, under a changed dispensation, the doleful wanderer now asks Christian burial in consecrated earth.[3] It is needless to give here elaborate details of the world-wide thought that when the corpse is buried, exposed, burned, or otherwise disposed of after the accepted custom of the land, the ghost accompanies its relics. The soul stays near the Polynesian or the American Indian burial-place; it dwells among the twigs and listens joyfully to the singing birds in the trees where Siberian tribes suspend their dead; it lingers by the Samoyed's scaffolded coffin; it haunts the Dayak's place of burial or burning; it inhabits the little soul-hut above the Malagasy grave, or the Peruvian house of sun-dried bricks; it is deposited in the Roman tomb (animamque sepulchro condimus); it comes back for judgment into the body of the later Israelite and the Moslem; it inhabits, as a divine ancestral spirit, the palace-tombs of the old classic and new Asiatic world; it is kept down by the huge cairn raised over Antar's body lest his mighty spirit should burst forth, by the iron nails with which the Cheremiss secures the corpse in its coffin, by the stake that pins down the suicide's body at the four-cross way. And through all the changes of religious thought from first to last in the course of human history, the hover-
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GHOSTS OF DEAD.
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