Note 44 — II.—BIRTH, MARRIAGE AND DEATH.

Why is Death commonly harbingered by apparitions in female shape, according to the superstitions of the East and the North, as well as of classical antiquity? The Greeks held that human life was controlled by the Fates. The Northmen had their Valkyriur, or female choosers of the slain. The companions of Anastasius in the prison at Constantinople saw “the frightful hag, the harbinger of the plague, hovering with her bat’s wings over their drear abode, and with her hooked talons numbering one by one her intended victims.” And now we are told that the thieves of our Indian cities have found out a way of utilizing this weird fancy. Some “old offenders,” in female disguise, go about the streets of Madras exactly at twelve at night and knock at the doors of houses inhabited by natives. “There is a strange belief among the uneducated natives that the she-devil Dengue (the name of the prevailing epidemic) raps at their door at that hour of the night, and that if any inmate opens he will be struck dead by her.” The unsuspecting natives—forgetting the hour—open, see the ominous figures, and “many of them drop down in a fainting fit.” The visitors make the best of the occasion.—Pall Mall Gazette. ↑