n sacrifices,
but they will never admit it, for it would bring them bad luck to
speak about it.

The villagers get on very well with the _bonga_. If any of them has
a wedding or a number of visitors at his house, and has not enough
plates and dishes, he goes to the banyan tree and asks the headman
to lend him some. Then he goes back to his house, and returning in a
little while finds the plates and dishes waiting for him under the
tree; and when he has finished with them he cleans them well and
takes them back to the tree.

CL. Lakhan and the Bongas.

Once a young man named Lakhan was on a hunting party and he pursued
a deer by himself and it led him a long chase until he was far from
his companions; and when he was close behind it they came to a pool
all overgrown with weeds and the deer jumped into the pool and Lakhan
after it; and under the weeds he found himself on a dry high road
and he followed the deer along this until it entered a house and he
also entered. The people of the house asked him to sit down but the
stool which was offered him was a coiled up snake, so he would not
go near it; and he saw that they were _bongas_ and was too frightened
to speak. And in the cattle pen attached to the house he saw a great
herd of deer.

Then a boy came running in and asked the mistress of the house
who Lakhan was; she said that he had brought their kid home for
them. Lakhan wanted to run away but he could not remember the road
by which he had come. Two daughters of the house were there and they
wanted their father to keep Lakhan as a son-in-law; but their father
told them to catch him a kid and let him go; so they brought him a
fawn and the two girls led him back and took him through the pool to
the upper world: but on the way they put some enchantment on him,
for two or three weeks later he went mad and in his madness he ran
about from one place to another and one day he ran into the pool and
was seen no more, and no one knows where he went or whether the two
bonga maidens took him away.

CLI. The House Bonga.

Once upon a time there was a house _bonga_ who lived in the house
of the headman of a certain village; and it was a shocking thief;
it used to steal every kind of grain and food, cooked and uncooked;
out of the houses of the villagers. The villagers knew what was going
on but could never catch it.

One evening however the _bonga_ was coming along with a pot of boiled
rice which it had stol