Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/170

164 mouse to injure me. I give you yonder field’ (specifying the field); ‘but if ever I catch you here again, by the help of the Mother of the gods I will rend you in seven pieces.’ Write this, and stick the paper on an unhewn stone in the field where the mice are, taking care to keep the written side uppermost.” It is fair to add that the writer in the Geoponica who records this receipt adds, in a saving clause, that “he does not himself believe it all, God forbid!” To keep wolves from his beasts, a Roman farmer used to catch a wolf, break its legs, sprinkle its blood all round the farm, and bury the carcase in the middle of it; or he took the ploughshare with which the first furrow had been traced that year and put it in the fire on the family hearth. So long as the ploughshare remained red-hot, so long no ravening wolf would harry his fold.

Greek farmers were much pestered by a rank weed called the lion-weed, which infested their fields. The Geoponica, as usual, comes to the rescue. Here are some of its receipts: “Take five potsherds; draw on each of them in chalk or other white substance a picture of Hercules strangling the lion. Deposit four of these potsherds at the corners of the field, and the fifth in the middle. The lion-weed will never show face in that field.” Here is another receipt taken from the same golden treasury: “A lion is very much afraid of a cock, and sneaks away with his tail between his legs when he sees one. So, if a man will boldly take a cock in his arms and march with it round the field, the lion-weed will immediately disappear.”

It was a common superstition in ancient Italy that if a woman were found spinning on a highroad, the crops would be spoiled for that year. So general and firmly rooted was this belief, that in most parts of Italy it was forbidden by law for a woman to spin on a highway, or even to carry her spindle uncovered along it. As a last