she sits there down to this blessed day.  Every New Year’s Day the sacristan comes and puts a morsel of the holy bread in her mouth, and that is all she has to live on.  Long, long has she rued her fatal wish who set this transient life above the eternal joys of heaven.[253] A third German story tells of a noble damsel who cherished the same foolish wish for immortality.  So they put her in a basket and hung her up in a church, and there she hangs and never dies, though many a year has come and gone since they put her there.  But every year on a certain day they give her a roll, and she eats it and cries out, “For ever! for ever! for ever!” And when she has so cried she falls silent again till the same time next year, and so it will go on for ever and for ever.[254] A fourth story, taken down near Oldenburg in Holstein, tells of a jolly dame that ate and drank and lived right merrily and had all that heart could desire, and she wished to live always.  For the first hundred years all went well, but after that she began to shrink and shrivel up, till at last she could neither walk nor stand nor eat nor drink.  But die she could not.  At first they fed her as if she were a little child, but when she grew smaller and smaller they put her in a glass bottle and hung her up in the church.  And there she still hangs, in the church of St. Mary, at Luebeck.  She is as small as a mouse, but once a year she stirs.[255]

Notes: 

[64] Pechuel-Loesche, “Indiscretes aus Loango,” Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, x. (1878) p. 23.

[65] Rev. J. Macdonald, “Manners, Customs, Superstitions, and Religions of South African Tribes,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xx. (1891) p. 118.

[66] Dudley Kidd, The Essential Kafir (London, 1904), p. 209.  The prohibition to drink milk under such circumstances is also mentioned, though without the reason for it, by L. Alberti (De Kaffersaan de Zuidkust van Afrika, Amsterdam, 1810, p. 79), George Thompson (Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa, London, 1827, ii. 354 sq.), and Mr. Warner (in Col.  Maclean’s Compendium of Kafir Laws and Customs; Cape Town, 1866, p. 98).  As to the reason for the prohibition, see below, p. 80.

[67] C.W.  Hobley, Ethnology of A-Kamba and other East African Tribes (Cambridge, 1910), p. 65.

[68] Rev. J. Roscoe, The Baganda (London, 1911), p. 80.  As to the interpretation which the Baganda put on the act of jumping or stepping over a woman, see id., pp. 48, 357 note 1.  Apparently some of the Lower Congo people interpret the act similarly.  See J.H.  Weeks, “Notes on some Customs of the Lower Congo People,” Folk-lore, xix. (1908) p. 431.  Among the Baganda the separation of children from their parents took place after weaning; girls usually went to live either with an elder married brother or (if there was none such) with one of their father’s brothers; boys in like manner went to live with one of their father’s brothers.  See J. Roscoe, op. cit. p. 74.  As to the prohibition to touch food with the hands, see Taboo and the Perils of the Soul, pp. 138 sqq., 146 sqq., etc.