But the belief does not stop here. One does not pass the custom-houses of this world, or at any rate of Greece, without some expenditure in duty or in _douceur_; and the same apparently holds true of the celestial custom-houses. Hence in some places the belief has generated a practice, or, to speak more exactly, has breathed a new spirit into the old practice of providing the dead with money. My view of the origin of this practice has already been explained; I have given reasons for holding that the coin placed in the mouth of the dead was simply a charm to prevent evil spirits from entering, or the soul from re-entering, into the body, and that the interpretation of the custom, according to which the coin was the fee of the ferryman Charon, was of comparatively late date. At the present day Charon in the _rôle_ of ferryman is almost forgotten; but in his place the Telonia seem locally to have become the recipients of the fee, and the old custom has thus received a second and equally erroneous explanation. This may have been the idea in the mind of my informant who vaguely said that a coin placed in the mouth of the dead was ‘good because of the aërial beings[756].’ If the particular aërial beings whom he had in mind were the Telonia, he no doubt thought of the coin as a fee payable to them, though in that case it is somewhat strange that he should not have used the name which actually denotes their toll-collecting functions. But from other sources at any rate comes evidence of a less ambiguous kind that the idea of paying the Telonia for passage is, or has been, a real motive in the minds of the peasantry. In Chios (where however the object actually placed in the mouth of the dead is clearly understood as a precaution against a devil entering the body) it is believed that the soul after death remains for forty days in the neighbourhood of its old habitation, the body, and then making its way to Hades has to pass the Telonia. Happy the soul that makes its voyage on Friday, for then the activities of the Telonia (who in the conception of the islanders are clearly evil spirits and not, as sometimes, the ministers of God) are restrained. But, to appease the Telonia and to ensure the safe passage of the soul, money is distributed to the poor[757]. The same usage obtains also at Sinasos in Cappadocia, and there the money so distributed is actually called τελωνιακά, ‘duty paid at the customs[758].’ The fact that in both these cases the money is now given in alms instead of being buried with the body is clearly a result of Christian influence; before that change was effected, it is reasonably likely that the widely-known practice of placing a coin in the mouth of the dead was explained in some places, though erroneously, by the belief that the dead must pay their way through the aërial custom-houses. The term περατίκι, ‘passage-money,’ by which, in the neighbourhood of Smyrna, is denoted the coin still in that district