be, no one would explain them as the result of community of _race_
between Cingalese and Aztecs. Nor would this explanation be offered to
account for the Aztec and English belief that the creaking of furniture
is an omen of death in a house. Obviously, these opinions are the
expression of a common state of superstitious fancy, not the signs of an
original community of origin.

Let us take another piece of folklore. All North-country English folk
know the Kernababy. The custom of the 'Kernababy' is commonly observed
in England, or, at all events, in Scotland, where the writer has seen
many a kernababy. The last gleanings of the last field are bound up in a
rude imitation of the human shape, and dressed in some tag-rags of
finery. The usage has fallen into the conservative hands of children,
but of old 'the Maiden' was a regular image of the harvest goddess,
which, with a sickle and sheaves in her arms, attended by a crowd of
reapers, and accompanied with music, followed the last carts home to the
farm. {18} It is odd enough that the 'Maiden' should exactly translate
[Greek], the old Sicilian name of the daughter of Demeter. 'The Maiden'
has dwindled, then, among us to the rudimentary kernababy; but ancient
Peru had her own Maiden, her Harvest Goddess. Here it is easy to trace
the natural idea at the basis of the superstitious practice which links
the shores of the Pacific with our own northern coast. Just as a portion
of the yule-log and of the Christmas bread were kept all the year
through, a kind of nest-egg of plenteous food and fire, so the kernababy,
English or Peruvian, is an earnest that corn will not fail all through
the year, till next harvest comes. For this reason the kernababy used to
be treasured from autumn's end to autumn's end, though now it commonly
disappears very soon after the harvest home. It is thus that Acosta
describes, in Grimston's old translation (1604), the Peruvian kernababy
and the Peruvian harvest home:--