Page:An Old English Home and Its Dependencies.djvu/279

Rh identical beast that had troubled her, and which he had so dexterously extracted. I believe there are few parishes in England in which similar tales are not told. I remember seeing a huge oriental centipede exhibited in a herbalist's window in a large town in Yorkshire, as having been an inmate of the stomach of a human being.

I have heard the same story as that told me in Devon, repeated in Sussex with this variation, that instead of an earthworm tempting the newt from its retreat, a roast leg of mutton was exhibited at the mouth of the patient. A friend of mine was warned by an old woman in Staffordshire not to eat cress from a brook, on the ground that an acquaintance of hers had once thus swallowed toad-spawn which had been hatched within her.

"Look, sir, at that 'ere boy!" said an urchin to me one day;" he's gotten a live frog in his innerds, and if you bide still you can hear it quack." "Nonsense," retorted the lad in question. "What you hear is conscience speakin'. That there chap ain't got no conscience at all. Put