(M68) Beliefs of the same sort still linger in various parts of Europe. Not very many years ago some old women in the Greek island of Carpathus were very angry at having their likenesses drawn, thinking that in consequence they would pine and die.(349) It is a German superstition that if you have your portrait painted, you will die.(350) Some people in Russia object to having their silhouettes taken, fearing that if this is done they will die before the year is out.(351) In Albania Miss Durham sketched an old man who boasted of being a hundred and ten years old. When every one recognised the likeness, a look of great anxiety came over the patriarch’s face, and most earnestly he besought the artist never to destroy the sketch, for he was certain that the moment the sketch was torn he would drop down dead.(352) An artist in England once vainly attempted to sketch a gypsy girl. “I won’t have her drawed out,” said the girl’s aunt. “I told her I’d make her scrawl the earth before me, if ever she let herself be drawed out again.” “Why, what harm can there be?” “I know there’s a fiz (a charm) in it. There was my youngest, that the gorja drawed out on Newmarket Heath, she never held her head up after, but wasted away, and died, and she’s buried in March churchyard.”(353) There are persons in the West of Scotland “who refuse to have their likenesses taken lest it prove unlucky; and give as instances the cases of several of their friends who never had a day’s health after being photographed.”(354) CHAPTER III. TABOOED ACTS. § 1. Taboos on Intercourse with Strangers.