When every house has been thus visited, the dough snake is buried and a small grave is erected over it. Hither during the nine days of September the women come to worship. They bring a basin of curds, a small portion of which they offer at the snake’s grave, kneeling on the ground and touching the earth with their foreheads. Then they go home and divide the rest of the curds among the children. Here the dough snake is clearly a substitute for a real snake. This is proved by the fact that in districts where snakes abound the worship is offered, not at the grave of the dough snake, but in the jungles where snakes are known to be. Besides this yearly worship performed by all the people, the members of the Snake tribe worship in the same way every morning after a new moon. The Snake tribe is not uncommon in the Punjaub. Members of it will not kill a snake and they say that its bite does not hurt them. If they find a dead snake, they put clothes on it and give it a regular funeral.(423) Ceremonies closely analogous to this Indian worship of the snake have survived in Europe into recent times, and doubtless date from a very primitive paganism. The best-known example is the “hunting of the wren.” By many European peoples—the ancient Greeks and Romans, the modern Italians, Spaniards, French, Germans, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, English, and Welsh—the wren has been designated the king, the little king, the king of birds, the hedge king, etc.,(424) and has been reckoned amongst those birds which it is extremely unlucky to kill. In England it is thought that if any one kills a wren or harries its nest, he will infallibly break a bone or meet with some dreadful misfortune within the year;(425) sometimes it is thought that the cows will give bloody milk.(426) In Scotland the wren is called “the Lady of Heaven’s hen,” and boys say— “Malisons, malisons, mair than ten, That harry the Ladye of Heaven’s hen!”(427)