Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/449

 Collectanea. 429

different. I know nothing of the folklore of that part of the country so cannot speak from personal experience of any similarity between it and the few gleanings which I have noted in this paper.

L. Salmon.

P.S. — An old woman lately told me the following. Ghosts used to be laid in the sheepfolds, because the sheep are such " innercent craturs." Thirteen ministers used to stand round and read some- thing out of the Bible, six reading forwards and seven backwards, until the ghost was conquered.

Holiday Gleanings : I. Cornwall.

When staying last August at the little village of Looe, Cornwall, I asked an old Cornish woman to go with me through the woods to visit a friend of mine. It was in the evening. She at once replied, " It is the twenty-first of the month. I daren't go through the woods." " Why not ? " I asked. " Things is said. I should hear all my future and my friends' futures whispered in the trees ; indeed I daren't. Miss ! " A Cornish maidservant afterwards told me the same thing, also using the expression, " Things is said " ; but she did not add the explanation about hearing the future described.

Margaret E. Hall.

Northaw Place, 19th November, 1902.

[This Cornish belief is not mentioned either by Hunt or by Miss Courtney. — Ed.]

II. Shropshire.

I was on the Wrekin one day last August with my children and a niece with fair hair and a very fair complexion. About half way up the hill is a " cocoanut shy " presided over by an elderly woman whose principal occupation, I learnt, was drawing {i.e. hawking) coal at Wellington, about two miles distant. As we descended the hill she had just set up her cocoanuts for the day ; and the children being anxious for a shy, I suggested that my niece should have first turn. The suggestion, however, did not