# Folk-Lore Record/Volume 1/Some West Sussex Superstitions Lingering in 1868/Chapter 5

CHAPTER V.
CHARMS AND OBSERVATIONS BELIEVED TO BE EFFECTUAL FOR THE CURE OR THE AVOIDANCE OF DIFFERENT AILMENTS.
LTHOUGH charms are no longer universally regarded as infallible cures, there are thousands amongst our rural population who still place more faith in them than in the skill of the doctor. A singular proof of this fact came under my observation a short time since, and in truth first led me to inquire into the existence of other popular superstitions.
(109) A poor woman in the village where I live had been very seriously scalded, and was in great suffering when I visited her; but still resolutely refused to let me send for the parish surgeon or apply any remedy whatsoever. Some days after I discovered that she had no faith in any other cure for a burn than a certain word-charm; and that the charm, to be quite efficacious, must be repeated over it on a Sunday evening. She therefore remained in great pain till Sunday arrived, and then sent for an old woman, who (as an eye-witness informed me) "bowed her head over the wound, crossed two of her fingers over it, and, after repeating some words to herself, huffed, or breathed quickly, on it." I was anxious to obtain this word-charm; but was told that persons who were so fortunate as to possess it kept it secret; at length I induced a noted charmer to repeat it to me, after she had assured me more than once that there was no harm in using it, for it was only a blessing, and had nothing to do with witchcraft. It is given verbatim, as I wrote it down at the time I heard it:
"There came two Angels from the North, One was Fire, and one was Frost. Out Fire: in Frost, In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."
The discovery of this singular cure for a burn induced me to search for other charms of a similar nature, that I soon found were held in ​high repute in the village. I accordingly paid a visit to an ancient dame who kept a small day-school, and was also a celebrated compounder of ointments, a collector of simples, and said to be a charmer of wounds caused by thorns. She assured me that many people came to her with bad wounds, and got her "to say her blessing over them; and a power of people she had cured with it in the course of her life." It was only four lines, and, as I seemed curious about them, she did not mind repeating them to me. (110) And then, holding up one of her fingers, and looking as earnestly at it as she could have done had there been a thorn to be charmed out of it, she said in a grave and mysterious tone,—
"Our Saviour Christ was of a pure virgin born, And He was crowned with a thorn; I hope it may not rage nor swell; I trust in God it may do well."
Once induced to confess that she was a dealer in charms, the old dame became communicative on the subject, and told me that she had inherited from her mother a charm for the bite of a viper, and another that cured giddiness in cattle; but that, in moving from the upper part of the village to the lower, she had had the misfortune to lose them both. In her time, however, she had worked surprising cures with them, and it often was a comfort to her to remember that, though silver and gold had she none, she had been able to do some good by her blessings: for which she never made any charge. When she was a young girl just going out to service, those for a burn and a thorn wound had been taught her by an old shepherd, who lodged with her mother, and who thought they might put a little money in her pocket. There was an old man, she went on to say, who lived out by Midhurst, noted for the cure of burns by a word-charm. He said the Lord's prayer over them, with his fingers crossed over the burn; and, after blowing upon it, said: "In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I hope it may do well;" and she named numerous cases in which the raging heat had instantly ceased, and the burn been cured by this blessing, after the doctor's stuff had been tried in vain. ​(111) Much did she grieve over the loss of her viper charm; it had done such a power of good. She had tried it once on a lad who had been stung by a viper coiled up in a bird's nest, into which ho put his hand. His arm went on to rage and swell, till it was as big round as her body, and a power of doctors came to see him, but they could do him no good. So she watched her opportunity, and went up stairs one day when she knew he was quite alone, and said her blessing over his arm, "and he was soon quite hearty again." "And since he has been a man grown," she exclaimed in a tone of exultation, "hasn't he been to see me, and didn't he say, you are the best friend I ever had, for I should not be here now but for your viper blessing?" (112) A farmer too, she went on to tell me, had come from a distance to beg her to save the life of a valuable cow that was taken suddenly ill, and she said her blessing for it, and before the farmer got home the cow was well again. Such is the value attached to these charms by the possessors of them, that an old man who died in our parish almshouse taught a poor woman who had waited on him during his last illness, in gratitude, and as he believed in full requital for her kindness to him, a charm infallible for a burn.
There are so few of all the ills that flesh is heir to for which some wise woman in West Sussex is not furnished with a cure, that one might suppose the office of the village doctor had become a sinecure, and, lest their traditionary recipes should die with the possessors, I have noted down from time to time such as I have heard prescribed. For our doctresses are a race that is diminishing, and few of them are better acquainted with pen, ink, and paper, than Shakspeare's old hermit of Prague, though one at least must be excepted, who, when I wanted to obtain from her some of the old word-charms which I knew her to be in the habit of using, said to me, "I promised the man who taught me them, by all that's good and great, never to tell them to any one, but I did not say I would not write them down, and I have done so, and they will be found after my death, for I should like to know I have done some good to my neighbours after I am gone."
It would perhaps be difficult to produce a more convincing proof of the hold that superstition still retains upon the minds of thousands than the following catalogue. ​At the head of my collection I set down in the terms dictated to me a few weeks since, by the head nurse in a family, two cures for the whooping-cough. (113) "Hang round the neck of the patient a silk bag filled with hair cut from the cross on the neck of a donkey; borrow the donkey; place the patient on its back, with his or her face looking towards its tail, and lead it to a certain spot fixed on in your own mind, three times running, for three succeeding days." The nurse assured me that this remedy had been tried on herself and her brother with eminent success; and that the hair was sewn up in the bags by the wife of the Clergyman, who had also lent the donkey on which they took their rides. (114) The second remedy, though of a much more simple kind, had worked no end of cures, "Hang round the patient's neck the excrescence often found upon the briar-rose, and called here in Sussex by the name of Robin Redbreast's Cushion; it is the finest thing known for the whooping-cough;" and I recollect a growth of this kind of unusual size being given to a little girl who had the whooping-cough, as a plaything. On seeing it, the nurse exclaimed, "I am glad to see that, I have been hunting for one for several days to hang round Miss Mary's neck."
(115) We have another infallible remedy for whooping-cough in whatever may be prescribed by the rider of a piebald horse. A man who was the owner of one lived a few years ago at Petworth, and never rode out on it without being accosted by some mother of a family, and solicited to tell her the best cure for whooping-cough. Sometimes he would reply "Ale and butter," sometimes "Honey and vinegar," in short, any strange compound that first occurred to him. But however strange might be the advice, it was always implicitly followed, and, said Mrs. Cooper, my informant, "the result has always been the same—the sick children were cured."
I believe that modern science has failed to discover the medicinal properties of vervain, (116) but its dried leaves, "worn in a black silk bag," are recommended as a cure for weakly children. A belief in the virtues of this insignificant plant is as old as the days of Druidism, when it was regarded as the cure for many ills, and as a fit offering to their gods.
For rheumatism, a malady so prevalent amongst the poor, there are ​many remedies; but I will only mention a few. One is pre-eminently absurd. (117) A clergyman, H—W—, told me a short time since that, finding an infirm old woman seated on the very edge of her chair, he expressed to her his fear that she would slip off; but she assured him that she was quite safe, and that she was sitting in that way in order to make room for the bellows behind her in the chair, as the leaning against them was "a fine thing for the rheumatis," not as might have been conjectured from the support afforded to her back, but because they would, as she believed, so placed charm away the malady.
(118) Another old woman said she couldn't no way understand her rheumatis being so uncommon bad, for she had put her shoes in the form of a cross every night by the side of her bed, ever since she felt the first twinge.
(119) The right fore-foot of a hare worn constantly in the pocket is considered a fine thing for rheumatism, but my old dame Mrs. Cooper's infallible remedy for it is, (120) "find an elder stick with three, five, or seven knots upon it; carry it in your pocket."
(121) For ague, the same authority prescribes "eat fasting seven sage-leaves seven mornings running." (122) Our coachman's daughter was advised to cure her ague by putting a caterpillar into a box and carrying it in her pocket, with the assurance that, as the caterpillar wasted away, her ague-fits would decrease. We have had several ague cases this spring, and one poor girl who had been ill for many weeks, on being asked the other morning how she felt, replied, "Better already, I thank you; I have been trying Mrs. Cooper's cure and it has done me good. She said it was a very innocent thing, and had cured many people that the doctor could do nothing for; it was only (123) to wear a leaf of tansey in my shoes; or, if I preferred it, I might eat two sage -leaves of a morning fasting for nine mornings."
(124) Sometimes we may observe a silver ring on the wedding-ring finger of a single woman; they are worn for the cure of fits, and are made out of six sixpences which have been begged from six young bachelors. I know that a young woman in a neighbouring village has long worn one of these magic rings, which will ward off all common fits, if worn with faith. ​(125) I have heard that a paw cut off from a live mole is good for toothache, and (126) one of my grandchildren who has been suffering from that malady has been recommended by her nurse to hunt for a double hazel-nut, and to carry it in her pocket, and then she will never be troubled again in the same way. From many other remedies for the agony I have selected the following, which is copied verbatim et literatim from the fly-leaf of a Book of Common Prayer lately belonging to a Sussex labourer and now in my possession.
(127) "As Peter sat weeping on a marvel stone, Christ came by and said unto him, Peter, what hailest thou—Peter answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God, my tooth eaketh. Jesus said unto him, Arise, Peter, and be thou hole; and not the only but all them that carry these lines for my sake, shall never have the tooth ake. Joseph Hylands his book."
The belief is that the possession of a Bible or a Prayer Book with this legend written in it is a charm against tooth-ache! We speak with compassion of the African Negro and Kaffir, who carry about charms written on slips of paper to avert or cure some bodily disease, perhaps little imagining, till accident reveals the painful fact, that thousands in our civilized England are practising observances more grossly superstitious, and believing just as firmly in their efficacy.
There cannot, I think, be produced a more convincing proof of this sad truth than the following remedy, still in common use both here and in many parts of Sussex, for the cure of rupture in children: (128) A child so afflicted must be passed nine times every morning on nine successive days at sunrise through a cleft in a sapling ashtree, which has been so far given up by the owner of it to the parents of the child, as that there is an understanding it shall not be cut down during the life of the infant who is to be passed through it. The sapling must be sound at heart, and the cleft must be made with an axe. The child on being carried to the tree must be attended by nine persons, each of whom must pass it through the cleft from west to east. On the ninth morning the solemn ceremony is concluded by binding the tree lightly with a cord, and it is supposed that as the cleft closes the health of the child will improve. In the neighbour​hood of Petworth some cleft ash-trees may be seen, through which children have very recently been passed. I may add, that only a few weeks since, a person who had lately purchased an ash-tree standing in this parish, intending to cut it down, was told by the father of a child, who had some time before been passed through it, that the infirmity would be sure to return upon his son if it were felled. Whereupon the good man said, he knew that such would be the case; and therefore he would not fell it for the world.
(129) In the cure of warts, again the ash-tree has its part; persons annoyed with those unsightly excrescences, after pricking them with a number of pins, stick the pins into an ash-tree, and believe that, as they become embedded in the growing bark, the warts will gradually disappear. (130) Many, however, instead of this charm, recommend the stealing of a small piece of meat and burying it in some road-side bank, and then as the meat decays so likewise will the warts; but on no account must the spot where the meat is hid be revealed to any one, or it will spoil the charm. (131) One old woman tells me that she "holds more to the simple peeling of a stick and burying it in muck." And, to justify her preference of this last popular superstition, it is quite certain that it may be carried back as far as to the time of Lord Bacon, who is, perhaps, too hastily asserted to have been a believer himself in the efficacy of the cure of warts by sympathy. ​(132) But the most singular superstition connected with the ash is the once very popular belief, not yet extinct, that the burying a shrewmouse alive, with sundry ceremonies, in a hole bored in it, would remedy the supposed evils inflicted by the shrew on man or beast. How so perfectly harmless an animal came to be regarded with as much horror as the most venomous of reptiles I never heard explained. But the antipathy to it has been bequeathed to us, and to this day the country people in West Sussex speak of it as a thing of evil omen; they believe (133) that it cannot attempt to pass a foot-path, or high road, without dying; and (134) talk of the injury it does to cattle, by creeping over them when they are asleep. (135) Within the memory of those living, the leaves or twigs of the "shrew-ash" have been employed to cure the injured cattle. I heard, but a few days ago, of a farmer, who found a valuable horse that had been turned over night into a meadow quite lame in the morning, uttering curses deep against those horrid "pick-nosed mice" (the name by which the shrew-mouse is known in Western Sussex), for having caused all the mischief to the injured limb. "Don't turn those cows into that meadow," said another farmer lately to a new servant, "or some harm will come to them, for the field's full of those picked-nosed mice." Traditional tales are told of the shrew-mouse tree in many parts of England; and, when the well-meaning vicar of Selborne (as White tells us, vol. i. pp. 355, 356), against the strong remonstrances of the by-standers, destroyed one that had long stood close to the parsonage, he vainly flattered himself that by rooting up the tree he should root out of the minds of his parishioners the superstitious belief in its virtues.
But the ash is not the only plant of power against the shrew. Drayton tells us that a bramble, "which at both ends was rooted deep," was in magic much availing; (136) through such a bramble
​cattle are still drawn, to cure them of the ills brought on them by the creeping of the shrew-mouse over them; and I am told (137) that children disfigured by eruptions are cured by passing them nine times through, on nine successive mornings, at the rising of the sun.
Further virtues are superstitiously ascribed to the ash, the tree of which Spenser speaks as being "for nothing ill." It is, however, singular, that the same superstition which looks upon the ash as possessing such supernatural powers of healing, regards it (138) as an especial attraction of lightning, to be avoided in a thunder-storm; and mothers teach their children to say—
"Beware of an oak, It draws the stroke; Avoid an ash, It courts the flash; Creep under the thorn, It can save you from harm."
(139) Another tree, the maple, although "seldom inward sound" itself, is supposed to be capable of bestowing long life on children who have passed through its branches. One of these length-of-days-bestowing maples had been long resorted to in West Grinstead Park; and when a rumour spread through the parish, a few years ago, that it was about to be cut down, humble petitions were presented that it might be spared.
But we must return to our mysterious pharmacy. (140) For the benefit of persons blessed with a good digestion, there is the recipe of our old village clerk for hydrophobia, "a slice of the liver of the dog that bit you, to be boiled and eaten."
(141) An approved remedy for wounds inflicted with a sharp instrument (akin to wise Sir Kenelm Digby's sympathetic cure by the anointing of the weapon that made the wound) is to keep it polished and bright until the injured part is healed. Several instances of the trial of this old superstitious remedy have come under my observation; but the most remarkable one occurred in the house of an acquaintance, one of whose men had fallen down upon a sword-stick and inflicted a serious wound on his back, which confined him to his bed for several ​days. During the whole of this time the sword-stick was hung up at his bed's head, and polished night and day at stated intervals by a female hand, and was anxiously examined lest a single spot of rust should be found there, as that would have been a token that the wounded man would die.
(142) Though I have no charm to cure headache on my list, agreeing with the old proverb that to prevent it is still better, I shall state a sure way of avoiding it in the spring. No hair either cut or combed from your head must be allowed to be thrown carelessly away, lest some bird should find it and carry it off, in which case your head would ache during all the time that the bird was busy working the spoil into its nest. "I knew how it would be," exclaimed a servant to me one day, "when I saw that bird fly off with a bit of my hair in its beak that blew out of the window this morning when I was dressing; I knew I should have a clapping headache, and so I have." (143) The same young woman remonstrated strongly against the throwing away of the cast teeth of children, affirming that, should they be found, and gnawed by any animal, the child's new tooth would be, for all the world, like the animal's that had bitten the old one. In proof of her assertion she named old Master Simmons, who had a very large pig's tooth in his upper jaw, a personal blemish that he always had averred was caused by his mother's having thrown one of his cast teeth away by accident in the hog-trough.
(144) If babies fret and do not appear to thrive, it is supposed that they are "longing." "Baby," said a nurse to me, "is so uncommon fretty, I do believe he must be longing for something." And to the question, What could he be longing for? the reply was, "Something that his mother longed for, but did not get, before he was born, and the best way to satisfy him would be, I think, to try him with a brandy cherry, or some hare's brains." (145) Or Baptism is looked forward to as a cure for fretfulness; and I have known a young mother to say of her baby, "Poor thing, it is very fretty, but I think it will be all right again after it is christened."
(14G) A necklace made of beads turned from the root of the peony is worn by children to prevent convulsions, and to aid dentition.
(147) The old traditionary word-charm for the hiccough, perhaps, hardly ought to be inserted in a list of superstitions, for most of us ​have ourselves proved its efficacy in our younger days. But the peculiarity of its application by my nurse, with whom it was a great favourite, was her requiring it to be said "thrice in one breath, or else the charm would fail:"
"Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper, A peck of pickled pepper Peter Piper picked, &c, &c."
(148) The application of a dock-leaf, with a certain form of words addressed to it, is supposed to cure nettle-stings.
(149) Another popular belief common to all classes is, that the humour on the eyelid called a "sty" can be cured by rubbing it three times with a plain gold ring; an operation I have frequently submitted to in my youth. The beneficial effect of gold upon a sty is alluded to by Beaumont and Fletcher in The Mad Lover, Act v.
(150) For the weakness of my eyes I have been assured that the best application would be the water that is found in the hollow cup of the teasel: and (151) a superstition lingering amongst us, worthy of the days of paganism, is, that the new May moon, aided by certain charms, has the power of curing scrofulous complaints. A man living in the neighbourhood of Chichester, whose children and grandchildren are much afflicted, has twice taken a journey of upwards of a hundred miles, with different members of his family, to visit a cunning man in Dorsetshire, who professes to be in possession of the charms. The month of May is the only month when they will work, and the sufferers, to derive any benefit therefrom, must have their eyes fixed on the new moon at the time when they are presented with a box of ointment made from herbs gathered when the moon was full. The poor man said that on his last visit to get a grandchild cured he found upwards of two hundred persons waiting to be charmed, and, as the new moon was not expected to rise before two o'clock, they sat up all night for fear of missing the right moment for looking at her. (152) Another sufferer at North Chapel was recommended to wear a live toad round his neck till it was dead; he has done so, and declares he feels the better for the inhuman remedy.
(153) For bad cases of jaundice many an old doctoress still prescribes "a live spider rolled up in butter." ​(154) Some of the sacramental wine that may remain unconsumed after consecration is regarded as a cure for debility in infancy and in extreme old age. A request came to me a short time since from a farmer's wife to endeavour to procure a little for her. The messenger, who was one of her daughters, said, "Mother thinks, as she has tried everything else that she can hear of, and it has done the baby no good, that a little of the sacramental wine might save it."
Wisely has it been ordered, for the prevention of all such abuses, that no part of the consecrated elements shall ever be reserved after the Communion is ended, or ever carried out of the church. It is by no means an uncommon thing, amongst the poorer classes, to receive the Holy Communion, when they feel very ill, from a belief they entertain that relief may be afforded to their bodily ailments by partaking of it; or even, as it would seem, by the good intention of so doing. A remarkable instance of this came under my observation. An old woman, in reply to an inquiry as to her health, said, "I think I am a deal better than when I last saw you. On Sunday there was a Sacrament; and says I to my next-door neighbour, 'As we are both going to have a cold dinner to-day, what do you say to our going to church, and staying the Sacrament?' and she said she was agreeable, but somehow we dawdled about till it was too late. But ever since I thought of going to the Sacrament I have not found near so much of the pain in my stomach."
(155) Persons who have been confirmed in their youth sometimes again present themselves for Confirmation in their old age, because they think the Bishop's blessing will cure them of some bodily ailment. I have heard of an old woman who was confirmed several times, because she thought it was good for her rheumatism, and a feeling of the same kind prevails when a poor woman tells you, (156) "I feel very weak and teary after my confinement, but I dare say I shall get up my strength after I have been churched." I have already mentioned the belief that fretfulness in infants will be cured by baptism.
(157) The following strange superstition also has in it a religious ​element. I knew a mother who refused the medicine offered to her for her child ill of the ague, because she had no faith in anything but passing it three times under the belly of an ass. Being pressed to give a reason for her faith, after some hesitation she replied, "Why, it is something about our Saviour's riding on an ass into Jerusalem; and about the cross that wasn't on the ass's back before, and has been there ever since that time."
(158) One day I called upon the village doctoress, who is possessed of so many wondrous receipts, when, our conversation turning on the ailment called the thrush, she struck her knees emphatically with both hands, and said, "I know the simplest remedy for that complaint, but people are so stupid. I often cannot get them to try it, and yet I have cured many by it in my time. When we were living under the hill, Master Hawkins came to me one day, and, says he, 'My baby is uncommon bad with its mouth.' 'It has got the thrush,' says I, 'and I'll just step back with you to tell your wife what she must do.' Well, when I saw the child, I thought this is as bad a case of thrush as ever I set eyes on. So says I to the child's mother, 'Do you know of a left twin girl anywhere here about?' She thought a minute, and then said, 'Yes, my cousin Eliza at the shop is a left twin.' 'Good,' says I, 'take the boy down to her, and ask her to blow into his mouth, and then to stop a minute; then to blow again, and stop a minute; and then blow for the third time, and the child will have no remains of the thrush to-morrow.' So, when she took it down, old Uncle Collins said, he did not see how any good could come of such a thing; but when he heard that I had ordered it he bade his daughter blow away, and so she did, and wasn't that poor suffering baby cured!" I asked her what was meant by a left twin, and what effect the blowing possibly could have upon such a complaint? She replied, the child that has outlived its fellow-twin is always called a left twin, and in such cases it's faith that works the cure. She could tell me, she said, of many that had been so cured, and mentioned a young woman, "wife of the man who keeps the inn upon the heath, who had the black thrush so bad that she could neither eat nor drink, but a young man, who was a left twin, came and blew in her mouth three times, and the thrush left her. "You see," she added, "it must be one of the male ​sex that blows into the mouth of a woman, and a female into that of a man."
(159) A revolting remedy is still resorted to for the cure of wens or goître in the throat—passing the hand of a corpse several times over the swollen part. The hand of a defunct felon was formerly regarded as most efficacious in such a case.
Some five-and-thirty years ago there stood a gibbet within sight of the high road that wound up Beeding Hill, our nearest way to Brighton. Standing on the wide desolate down, with all its fearful associations, it was an object of great terror to me in my youthful days; and the dread of seeing it and hearing my nurse repeat her oft-told tale of the murderer who had been hung on it in chains, and how he had been seen swinging on a windy night and heard rattling his irons, made the prospect of a visit to the sea-side, which involved the sight of the gallows anything but pleasurable. Amongst my nurse's fearful stories there was one relating (160) to the curing of a wen by the touch of the dead murderer's hand. She actually knew some one who knew the woman who had been touched with it; and she described most graphically the whole frightful scene, how the woman was taken under the gallows in a cart and was held up in order that she might touch the dead hand, and how she passed it three times over the wen and then returned homeward. This superstitious practice happily expired with the abolition of the gibbet; but the remedy of the dead hand is still sometimes resorted to. Not very long ago, in the neighbouring village of Storrington, a young woman afflicted with a goître was taken by her friends to the side of an open coffin in order that the hand of the corpse might touch it twice. Mrs. Charles Standen of this place, who has for some years had an enlarged throat, on hearing that a boy was drowned in Waltham Lock, set off immediately and had the part affected stroked with the dead hand nine times from east to west, and the same number of times from west to east.
(161) The belief that a sick person who grows thin in spite of a ravenous appetite has a snake or (as it is called) a nanny-wiper in the stomach, lingers still amongst us; and I very lately heard the illness of a poor woman who has been out of health for the last two years ascribed to this cause by her next-door neighbour. She said that the ​woman was always hungry, but that nothing she ate or drank did her a bit of good, for the nanny-wiper took it all. The snake is supposed to be very fond of milk, and I was gravely told that a cousin of hen who was tormented by one held some milk for a time in her mouth, and at last the snake "came quite up in her throat after it," and that the only way was, to set some warm milk on a table in a saucer, and, pretending to go to sleep, to sit with your mouth wide open, and, when the nanny-wiper came out to drink, for somebody to knock it on the head.
(162) I have been told that nine mice roasted to a cinder, then powdered till they are as fine as dust, and swallowed fasting in a glass of ale, are a fine thing for some particular cases of debility. My informant had however tried it on her own son, and she confessed that it had failed.
I have a note of two other superstitions of the remediate class which I have hesitated to put on my list; but, after all, I think they are too curious to be left unrecorded. When a poor child has in vain been whipped and scolded for the nightly repetition of a certain involuntary offence, in the last resort one of the two following remedies may be tried: (163) Upon the day appointed for the funeral of a person not of the same sex as the child, while the first part of the burial office is being read within the church, the child is to be taken to the open grave and is there to do that which constituted the original offence. My informant told me that, although she had taken her own little boy to the churchyard, he had not had the courage to carry out this first remedy, and so she tried the second with complete success. (164) It consists in the child's first going alone to fix upon an ash-tree suitable for the purposes of the charm, and going afterwards upon another day, without divulging its intention, to gather a handful of the ash-keys, which it must lay with the left hand in the hollow of the right arm. Thus are they to be carried home and then they are to be burnt to ashes. The charm is completed by the child performing the same ceremony over the embers on the hearth, which in the former remedy it was to go through at the open grave.
(165) I conclude this chapter by mentioning a preventive of the plague of fleas, though there may be some difficulty in its application, ​as there is unfortunately a material variation between my two authorities on a most essential point. "If you wish to keep fleas out of your house," says Elizabeth Hinds, my daughter's nurse, "you must be up before the sun on the 1st of March, and, throwing open a window, say, 'Good morning, March.'" But Mrs. Webb, the monthly nurse, says on the contrary, "If from fleas you would be free, on the 1st of March let all your windows closed be." She added, however, that she had tried it, but it had not altogether answered—a few crept in.
* ↑ In that collection of strange facts worth inquiring into, and of being submitted to the test of experience and observation, which Lord Bacon calls his Natural History, No. 997, on the subject of what are termed sympathies and antipathies, it is recorded that "the taking away of warts by rubbing them with somewhat that afterwards is put to waste and consume is a common experiment, and I do apprehend it the rather because of my own experience. I had from my childhood a wart on one of my fingers; afterwards, when I was about sixteen years old, being then at Paris, there grew upon both my hands a number of warts—at the least an hundred, in a month's space. The English Ambassador's lady, who was a woman far from superstition, told me one day she would help me away with my warts: whereupon she got a piece of lard with the skin on, and rubbed the warts all over with the fat side; and, amongst the rest; that wart which I had had from my childhood: then she nailed the piece of lard, with the fat towards the sun, upon a post of her chamber window, which was towards the south. The success was, that within five weeks' space all the warts went quite away: and that wart which I had so long endured for company. But at the rest I did little marvel, because they came in a short time and might go away in a short time again: but the going away of that which had stayed so long doth yet stick with me. They say the like is done by the rubbing of warts with a green alder stick, and then burying the stick to rot in muck." Lord Bacon does not however say that either of these two extraordinary facts had been established on sufficient evidence, but that they were worth inquiring into by further observation as strange and questionable instances of asserted sympathy.
* ↑ See also Bacon's Natural History, No. 998.
* ↑ See (145).