Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/493

 Collectanea. 461

I was talking the other day to an elderly woman whose memory is full of old tales. Our conversation turned on the subject of the new moon, and she gave me this charm to find out who one's future husband would be.

" If you want to see whom you will marry, miss, you must go out of the house in the first quarter of the new moon (Hallows Eve is the best, but the moon must be in its first quarter, if not you will see nothing). And you must see it for the first time. When you get a sight of it kneel down, and with a black-handled knife lift a sod from under your right knee and from under the toe of your right foot, repeating :

" ' New moon, true moon, Happy may I be ; Whoever is my true love This night may I see.'

"Then repeat the Lord's Prayer; lift a sod of earth, and with the earth you took from under your right knee and foot, hide it somewhere outside the house till you are ready to go to bed, then bring it inside. You must not speak a word to a living soul once the earth is brought into the house. Then put the earth into the right-foot stocking, and put that under your head. But be sure you speak to no one till morning. A lady my mother knew did this and told nobody till afterwards, but she dreamt of the gentle- man she married, though at the time she did not know him and had never set eyes on him. Well, my mother told me that she did it too at the same time as the lady I told you of. And my mother dreamt that she went down to the kitchen, and what did she see but a tall dark young man sitting by the fire. She asked him what was he doing there, and when he would not go away she tried to push him away with the poker, but he would not go for her. She was a young girl then, and it was many years after that that she first saw my father. He could only have been about nine or ten years old when she dreamt about him, for my mother was eight years older nor him. He asked her to marry him many times, but she said he was too young for her. At last he ran away with her and then she had to take him."

Here are a few superstitions given me by the same person.

" They say that if your eyebrow itches it is a sign that you will get drink ; or your nose, that you will drink with strangers ; or your