This superstition appears to have been confined to the West only. In the East, luckily, there is no such antipathy to extend a helping hand to the drowning. It may be mentioned, however, that in his _Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India_ Crooke seems to suggest that this feeling is also common in India, but he cites no examples although he gives several instances and quotes several authorities concerning the Western ideas on the subject. We, however, find no such instance recorded anywhere. In the year 1893 Mr. Sarat Chandra Mitra read before the Anthropological Society of Bombay a paper on some superstitions regarding drowning. He quoted several Western examples concerning the aversion to save drowning people but gave no parallel for any of these from the folklore of Bengal and Upper India with which he is intimately familiar. If such antipathy did exist, that indefatigable student of Indian folklore would have certainly heard of it. Crooke appears to have confounded two separate, though analogous, ideas, and to have assumed that the prevalence of one connotes the existence of the other. There is, of course, abundant evidence in Indian folklore to show that it was believed throughout this country that the spirits of those persons who got drowned wandered for a hundred years if their corpses were not properly and solemnly buried with all the requisite ceremonies. The spirits of the drowned are, therefore, believed to haunt those rivers and wells and tanks in which they have found their graves, just as the fisher-folk of England believed that the spirits of the sailors who were drowned by a shipwreck frequented those parts of the shores near which the shipwreck took place. In his “Romances in the West of England” Hunt refers to these superstitions. The mere prevalence, however, of one of the superstitious beliefs of the same class in two countries does not warrant the sweeping assertion that the other beliefs also prevail in both the countries. CHAPTER XII. RIVER WRAITHS.