except the
sacred stones; they are left to the wirreenun nearest of kin to the
dead person.

Lately a case came under my notice of the taboo extended to the
possessions of dead people.

A black man having two horses died. Neither his widow nor her mother
would use those horses, even when he had been dead over a year. They
would walk ten or twelve miles for their rations and carry them back,
rather than use those horses before the term of mourning was over.

The widow was one of my particular friends, but she would not come to
see me because her husband had been at the house shortly before he
died. She camped nearly a mile away, and I went to see her there. After
he had been dead about a year, she came to see me; but before she did
so her mother walked all round the out-buildings, garden, yards, etc.,
with a bunch of smoking Budtha, crooning little spirit songs.

CHAPTER XI

SOMETHING ABOUT STARS AND LEGENDS

Venus in the Summer evenings is a striking object in the western sky.
Our Venus they call the Laughing Star, who is a man. He once said
something very improper, and has been laughing at his joke ever since.
As he scintillates you seem to see him grinning still at his
Rabelais-like witticism, seeing which the {aborigines} say:

'He's a rude old man, that Laughing Star.'

The Milky Way is a warrambool, or water overflow; the stars are the
fires, and the dusky haze the smoke from them, which spirits of the
dead have lit on their journey across the sky. In their fires they are
cooking the mussels they gather where they camp.

There is one old man up there who was once a great rainmaker, and when
you see that he has turned round as the position of the Milky Way is
altered, you may expect rain; he never moves except to make it.

A waving dark shadow that you will see along the same course is
Kurreah, the crocodile.

To get to the Warrambool, the Wurrawilberoo, two dark spots in Scorpio,
have to be passed. They are devils who try to catch the spirits of the
dead; sometimes even coming to earth, when they animate whirlwinds and
strike terror into the blacks. The old men try to keep them from racing
through the camp by throwing their spears and boomerangs at them.

The Pleiades are seven sisters, as usual, the dimmed ones having been
dulled because on earth Wurrunnah seized them and tried to melt the
crystal off them at a fire; for, beautiful as they were with their long
hair, they were ice-maidens. B