________________
APRIL, 1891.]
FOLKLORE IN SALSETTE; No. 8.
143
seventh! Where shall I get the means wherewith to support her? However, I must submit to fate."
One day the gôsánvi said to his wife: - “Wife, make us some pôle.”3
The wife asked : - "How many pôlé will one sér of rice make ? At any rate, they will hardly be ready before our girls will eat them up."
Upon this the gôsdivi said: - "Shut them all up in a room while you make the pôle quietly, and then we can eat them together."
So saying to his wife he went away on his daily vocation of begging. The wife, as instructed, shut up all the girls in a room, ground the rice and methiá, and some time afterwards began to make the pôlé. As soon as the sound of the cooking of a pôlá reached the ears of the girls, one of them called out to her mother, saying she must come out for a certain purpose. The mother let her come out, but the girl made straight for the kitchen and ate up the first pola. The same thing occurred with the second and with the third, and in fact with all the pôlé, for the dough could only just make up seven p8l6.
Now the mother did not know what to say to her husband on his return, much less what to give him to eat. So she took some ashes and made two pole, one for herself and the other for her husband. Some time after this the gôsánvi returned after begging, and husband and - wife sat down to their meal. At the first morsel the gôsánví became enraged and asked his wife to explain what sort of pôlé she had made, and what it all meant. The poor wife told hiin everything: how she shut the girls up in the first place; how she made the seven pôlé ; how the girls came and ate them all; and how she was compelled to make two of ashes for themselves.
Upon this the gôsánvi said : -"This will never do. I will take the girls and leave them in a forest, whence they cannot return, and they shall no more be a burden upon us."
His wife had no alternative but to agree without saying a word. So the same evening be got the girls together, and said: - "Come girls, your maternal uncle has asked me to bring you to his house. Be sharp, and dress yourselves quickly."
On being told that they were called by their maternal uncle, though they had never before heard of him, much less seen him, the girls were in a hurry to be off, and got themselves dressed with what rags they could afford, and set out immediately with their father.
The father led them on throngh a forest for many hours, and, whenever the girls asked him how much further off their uncle's house was, he would answer :-"A long way further yet." And so they walked on and on for several hours, till the lord of darkness overtook them, and then their father said:
"Girls, your uncle's house is a long way off yet, and so we must sleep to-night in this forest.”
The poor girls little thought of their father's trick, and so went to sleep. Now it happened that the youngest daughter of the good ivi, the one that popped out of the blister, was in the habit of sucking her father's thumb when going to sleep, and as soon as the thumb was removed she would awake. Of course the object of the gótánví in bringing his daughters into the forest was to leave them there and go away, but the difficulty was how to manage the youngest daughter. He managed this, however, by cutting off his thumb, and leaving it in the little girl's mouth! In this way the gosanvi left them all asleep.
Pole, singular pola, are made in the following way: - Ordinary rice and a little quantity of another grain (mithf, plural méthis) are ground together. The flour is made into dough with toddy and water, and allowed to remain for a few hours. After this an earthen táma (platter) is placed on the oven, a little oil mbbed on it (usually with a stick of the plantain leaf after beating it into the shape of a brush), and a little of the dough poured on it, which in a sbort time wakes a pola,
