Boys and girls early come to know the stone lions, which stand opposite points where straight lanes or streets enter other streets, or in front of temples and yamens. These curious images have broad noses and tufted manes and tails. Some crouch close against a block in a wall, with round eyes and long teeth, looking as if they were going to walk out of the stone. Many have their heads on one side, with a double string hanging down from their mouths. Some have a baby lion in front of them or a carved ball under one paw. A few have a ball inside their stone jaws and some are crouching as if to spring. The children are told that these stone lions stand in front of houses to prevent evil spirits or ghosts from coming along the lane to hurt people inside. They say that in the middle of the night the lions come down from their stone pedestals and play about the streets with their balls, rolling over and over one another! One lion, which was supposed to change himself into a man and roam about the streets, has been caged with bars and is kept safely shut up in a little temple of his own in Chinchew. Then children are also told that coffins, which have been shone upon by the moon, turn into ghosts and walk about the streets, trying to catch people. They think there are demons who call and howl whenever anyone is going to die. They say, too, that the spirits of drowned people turn into duck demons, which swim near the edge of ponds. If anyone is foolish enough to try to catch them, they drag him under the water and drown him. The drowned man then becomes the duck demon, and the first man can escape. Then children are told of serpent demons and foxes that turn into people, and bring hurt to those who take them into their houses. A famous story is that of a man who met a beautiful lady and married her. One day he came home rather sooner than his wife expected him, and could not find her anywhere. At last he peeped through a hole in an old shed, and there he saw a hideous demon, painting its skin, which was stretched on a board. Looking at the skin the man saw that it was his wife’s, and so knew he had married a fox-demon and not a woman. “If you could stretch your hand three feet above your head you would touch the spirits,” is a common saying. Fork-like prongs stick out from the roofs of the houses to drive away demons. Streets and roads often, for no reason, turn a sharp corner, and the furrows ploughed in the fields are awry, so that the spirits may lose their way and not come along them to hurt people. They think there are spirits of the door and spirits under the eaves, spirits of the rafters and spirits of the bed. Sometimes you will see a head with a shining sword in its mouth above a door; sometimes a sword, made of round brass cash, tied together by a red cord, hangs in a bedroom. If a wicked spirit comes to hurt anyone inside the room the spirit of the sword is supposed to flash out and drive it away.