In a land where superstitious practices abound, the children are sure to have more than an ordinary belief in goblins and ghosts. The belief in divers supernatural beings of evil or good intent is powerfully implanted in every adult mind. In the case of the children every natural phenomenon, every event of their lives is to them under the control of some invisible spirit. They have a profound belief in their marvellous fairy tales, and many of them never grow out of this extreme condition of credibility during the whole of their existence. They cling to their mystic interpretations of natural phenomena, with such force, that in the schools that have been recently founded, the attempts to teach the elements of natural science have been made under rather disheartening circumstances. The children are perfectly certain that thunder is exactly what their name for it denotes, "the sky crying." There is a horrible giant of great strength and furious temper who leads a very quarrelsome life with a cantankerous wife, and when he grumbles and growls at her various iniquities, the echo of his voice comes in cries from the sky. When in fits of violent anger he hurls his ponderous hatchet at his spouse, it strikes the floor of heaven, and a thunderbolt falls. When the broad flashes of lightning play at hide-and-seek amongst the dense black masses of cloud during the wet months of the rainy season, they say a woman is flashing a mirror in the air, or according to another interpretation, the angels are amusing themselves by striking fire with bricks. The falling stars are produced when frolicsome spirits in their sportive moods pitch torches at each other. When the giant crab comes up out of his hole in the deep parts of the sea, he bears up the waters on his back, and the tide flows; when he retires again, it ebbs. Sometimes the angels in heaven all take it into their heads to have a bath at the same time, and as a consequence they splash the water over the sides of the bath, and the rain falls. Another theory states, however, that the rain is caused by a huge fish a thousand miles long, who with his mighty tail furiously lashes the waters of the deep. The most poetical of all these superstitions is that which ascribes the origin of the winds to the voices of the babies who have departed this life.