purification of the strikers.’ ” The writer to whom we owe this description adds: “This taking of meat from the trencher without using the hands is evidently a matter of ritual.”(587) The observation is correct. Here as in so many cases persons ceremonially unclean are forbidden to touch food with defiled hands until their uncleanness has been purged away. The same taboo is laid on the manslayer by the Bageshu of British East Africa. Among them a man who has killed another may not return to his own house on the same day, though he may enter the village and spend the night in a friend’s house. He kills a sheep and smears his chest, his right arm, and his head with the contents of the animal’s stomach. His children are brought to him and he smears them in like manner. Then he smears each side of the doorway with the tripe and entrails, and finally throws the rest of the stomach on the roof of his house. For a whole day he may not touch food with his hands, but picks it up with two sticks and so conveys it to his mouth. His wife is not under any such restrictions. She may even go to mourn for the man whom her husband has killed, if she wishes to do so.(588) In some Bechuana tribes the victorious warrior is obliged to eat a piece of the skin of the man he killed; the skin is taken from about the navel of his victim, and without it he may not enter the cattle pen. Moreover, the medicine-man makes a gash with a spear in the warrior’s thigh for every man he has killed.(589) Among the Angoni, a Zulu tribe settled to the north of the Zambesi, warriors who have slain foes on an expedition smear their bodies and faces with ashes, hang garments of their victims on their persons, and tie bark ropes round their necks, so that the ends hang down over their shoulders or breasts. This costume they wear for three days after their return, and rising at break of day they run through the village uttering frightful yells to drive away the ghosts of the slain, which, if they were not thus banished from the houses, might bring sickness and misfortune on the inmates.(590) In some Caffre tribes of South Africa men who have been wounded or killed an enemy in fight may not see the king nor drink milk till they have been purified. An ox is killed, and its gall, intestines, and other parts are boiled with roots. Of this decoction the men have to take three gulps, and the rest is sprinkled on their bodies. The wounded man has then to take a stick, spit on it thrice, point it thrice at the enemy, and then throw it in his direction. After that he takes an emetic and is declared clean.(591)