Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/263

 Correspondence. 225

burned, making thin smoke, till the fire was put out by the heavy rains of October, 1903. Unless you dug down to find the red-hot peat it was invisible, except during gales, when the light peat-ashes were blown away. Then for a few minutes at a time there would be a burst of flame.

Another such fire in my parish, also on ground drained and kept dry by a watercourse, burned for years, till it was finally trenched out by cutting a narrow ditch all round it down to the wet peat. I never saw the flame in this case, and the smoke was so thin that it was only visible on damp or foggy nights. The smell of burning peat was to be detected summer and winter.

E. A. WooDRUFFE Peacock.

Mock Burial. (Vol. XV. p. 347.)

In the year 1875 or 1876 several of my brother's children had whooping-cough. We were living at Adisham, a small village in East Kent. I was talking one day to the village " Gamp," who, after much hesitation and deprecation, told me she knew how the children could be cured. I was to bury a baker's loaf in the churchyard, leave it there one night, and then give it to them to eat.

Evelyn Villiers.

Lexham Gardens, Kensington.