Precisely what the door is to the house, that the mouth is to man; it is the door by which the spirit comes into and goes out of man. With his first inspiration he becomes a living soul; with his last breath he expires--gives up his soul. The story is well known of the two shepherds who sat together one summer’s day. One fell asleep, and whilst he slept the other saw a bee issue from his lips and creep over a blade of grass that crossed a tiny trickle of water, then fly away among flowers. After an hour the bee returned again in the same way, and re-entered the sleeping man’s mouth. Thereupon he awoke, and told his friend that in dream he had crossed a magnificent bridge over a great river, and had visited Paradise. [Illustration: _Fig. 48._--CRANIAL DISC, WITH HOLE FOR SUSPENSION.] [Illustration: _Fig. 49._--CRANIAL DISC, WITH TWO HOLES FOR SUSPENSION.] In the Caucasus, among the Abazas, when a boy dies he is put into a wooden coffin _with a hole in it_, and hung up in a tree. Bees are supposed to fly in and out at the hole, and these are taken, no doubt, to be souls visiting the boy, and the soul of the boy going in and out along with them. I remember some years ago when a person was dying and seemed to find great difficulty in the parting of soul from body, that the nurse went to the window and opened it, whereupon the dying person heaved a sigh, and the spirit took its flight. On asking the reason of this opening of the window, the nurse answered, “You would not have the soul go up the chimney, would you?” Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in his poem “The Gift of the Sea,” refers to this belief:-- “The widow ... Opened the door on the bitter shore To let the soul go free.” Again, it has often been noticed that holes have been knocked or bored in funeral urns containing incinerated bones. These have been made purposely, and must have had some signification. I have not myself examined such urns on the spot where discovered; but I have little hesitation in surmising that only such urns have been perforated as have had their mouths covered with another vessel inverted, or with a flat stone, and that the object of this perforation has been to make a door of ingress or egress for the spirit of the dead; that, in fact, it had the same purpose as the hole in the dolmen and the rupture of continuity in the circle.