Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/290

 252 not content with living by herself, she contrives to bring up a little family. Often have I been told of the man who got rid of a mamma newt and six young ones by the following recipe, which I am assured is infallible: the patient must abstain from all fluids for four-and-twenty hours, and eat only salt meats; at the expiration of that time, being very thirsty, he must go and lie open-mouthed over a running stream, the noisier the better, when the newts, dying of thirst, and hearing the music of the water, cannot resist the temptation, but come forth to drink, and of course you take care they do not get back again. The dry ask, in addition to this bad character, is also supposed to be endowed with the power of the "evil eye," children and cows exposed to its gaze wasting away. The Rev. J. Graves writes to me that in Kilkenny it is looked on as "a devil's beast," and as such is burnt. But, to compensate in some measure for its evil qualities, the dry ask is said in Dublin to bear in it a charm. Anyone desirous of the power of curing scalds or burns has only to apply the tongue along the dry ask's belly to obtain the power of curing these ailments by a touch of that organ. In Queen's County it is also used to cure disease, but in a different way; being put into an iron pot under the patient's bed it is said to effect a certain cure, though of what disease I am not quite clear."

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In a visit to Girgenti this winter I came to hear of a custom that seemed to me interesting as apparently a survival or metamorphosis of some rite connected with the ancient Demeter worship. I write to ask if you know whether the custom has been described by any student from personal observation, and, if so, if you can refer me to such description. The account I am sending was given me by Captain Adolf Ragusa, the proprietor of the Hotel des Temples, Girgenti, who observed it last year for the first time, but took no special notice of it, not imagining that any