Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/367

 Rh 3. Then there is an elaborate process of eaves-dropping recommended to young women curious to know their husbands' names: a girl would go with her mouth full of water and her hands full of salt to the door of the nearest neighbour's house, or rather to that of the nearest neighbour but one, for I have been carefully corrected more than once on that point. There she would listen, and the first name she caught would prove to be that of her future husband. Once a girl did so, as I was told by a blind fisherman in the South, and heard two brothers quarrelling inside the house at whose door she was listening. Presently the young men's mother exclaimed that the devil would not let Tom leave John alone. At the mention of that triad the girl burst into the house, laughing and spilling the mouthful of water most incontinently. The end of it was that before the year was out she married Tom, the second person mentioned: the first either did not count or proved an unassailable bachelor.

4. There is also a ritual for enabling a girl to obtain other information respecting her future husband: vessels placed about the room have various things put into them, such as clean water, earth, meal, a piece of a net, or any other article thought appropriate. The candidate for matrimony, with her eyes bandaged, feels her way about the house until she puts her hand in one of the aforesaid vessels. If what she lays her hand on is the clean water, her husband will be a handsome man ; if it is the earth, he will be a farmer; if the meal, a miller; if the net, a fisherman, and so on into as many of the walks in life as may be thought worthy of consideration.

careless enough never to have asked the question. I have referred it to Mr. Moore, who informs me that nobody, as I expected, will venture on an explanation, by whom the foot-marks are made.