The Spey also takes one life each year, and so do several British rivers elsewhere. Originally, no doubt, the victim was deliberately chosen and slain annually; but later on, as a mitigation of the custom, the river itself seems to have selected its own spirit by divine chance, such as we have already seen in action more than once in the earlier cases. In other words, if a passer-by happened to be accidentally drowned, he was accepted in place of a deliberate victim. * Hence the danger of rescuing a man from drowning; you interfere with the course of divine selection, and you will pay for it yourself by being the next victim. “When, in the Solomon Islands, a man accidentally falls into a river, and a shark attacks him, he is not allowed to escape. If he succeeds in eluding the shark, his fellow-tribesmen throw him back to his doom, believing him to be marked out for sacrifice to the god of the river.” Similarly, in Britain itself, the Lancashire Ribble has a water-spirit called Peg o’ Nell, represented by a stone image, now headless, which stands at the spring where the river rises in the grounds of Waddon. (Compare the Adonis tomb and grove by the spring at Aphaca.) This Peg o’ Nell was originally, according to tradition, a girl of the neighbourhood; but she was done to death by incantations, and now demands every seven years that a life should be quenched in the waters of the Ribble. When “Peg’s night” came round at the close of the septennate, unless a bird, a cat, or a dog was drowned in the river, it was sure to claim its human victim. This name of Peg is evidently a corruption of some old local Celtic or pre-Celtic word {266}for a nymph or water-spirit; for there is another Peg in the Tees, known as Peg Powler; and children used there to be warned against playing on the banks of the stream, for fear Peg should drag them into the water. Such traces of a child-sacrifice are extremely significant. * Here is an analogue in foundation sacrifices. A house was being built at Hind Head while this book was in progress. A workman fell from a beam and was killed. The other workmen declared this was luck for the house and would ensure its stability.