bleating of a sheep while it is being slaughtered. A councilor, to whom it occurred to hear this sign, was told by a prophet that it "foreboded his death." Strange to say, his chief soon after sent soldiers to kill him, and the man only averted his threatened fate by escaping to Natal. Among other natural events which are omens to the Kafirs are, "a child born dead; a woman two days in parturition; a man burnt while sitting by the fire, unless he were asleep or drunk" (K. N. pp. 162, 163). "An unexpected whirlwind will suggest to" the Chinese "the contest of evil spirits; and the flying of a crow in a peculiar direction fill them with consternation. In such a deplorable state," gravely observes the missionary who records these facts, "is the heathen mind" (C. O., vol. ii. p. 208). Perhaps he did not consider that there were many in more enlightened countries who would be alarmed at the omen implied by a dinner-party of thirteen, and who would regard it as of evil augury to begin a journey on Friday. In such a deplorable state is the Christian mind. Ceylon appears to be remarkable for the faith placed by its inhabitants in omens, which are even said to regulate their whole conduct and to intimate their destiny from birth onwards. Children, of whose future the astrologers predict evil, are sometimes destroyed in order to avoid their pre-determined misery. On going out in the morning, the Singhalese anxiously remark the object they encounter first, in order to deduce from it a favorable or unfavorable augury for the business of the day. "I, as a European," says the author who tells us these facts, "was always a glad sight to them;" for "a white man or a woman with child" were good omens; but beggars and deformed persons so unlucky, as even to stop these hapless folk from proceeding in the work they were about during the day on which these boding signs were the first things to meet their gaze (A. I. C., p. 194). Another phenomenon of a somewhat less ordinary kind serves as an omen to the Singhalese, though apparently only in reference to a single fact. There is visible in Ceylon "a peculiar and beautiful meteor," termed "Buddha rays," which "is supposed by the natives only to appear over a temple or tomb of Buddha's relics, and from thence to emanate." The appearance of these rays is taken by believers as a sign that the Buddhist faith will last for the destined span of five thousand years from its founder's death (E. Y., vol. i. p. 337); much as the rainbow is held by Jews and Christians to be the token of a promise that God will never again punish the world by a universal deluge.