Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/568

512 walls, and both must be open. The spirit comes in by the door (and goes out by the window?). Each girl who undertakes to keep watch must have a separate supper and a separate candle, and all talking is to end before the clock goes twelve, for there must not be any speaking before the spirits." From these superstitions, and from the generally received idea that the spirits of all the parishioners are to be observed entering the church on St. Mark's E'en, it may be inferred that the Manx footprint is made by the wraith of the person doomed to death.

Another Hallowmas custom was lately mentioned to me by a woman between seventy and eighty, who has spent all her life in the district lying between the Trent and the Ancholme. "When I was a girl", she said, "I had no more sense than to make dumb-cake with the other lasses on Hallow-E'en. Three of us made it with a virgin-egg (that is, the first egg laid by a pullet), flour, and a little water—not more than a spoonful. We mixed the cake, and baked it on a shovel over the fire, without speaking; but just as it was fit, the shovel fell backwards with a clatter, and wakened master, who slept in the room above. Down he came to see what the noise below-stairs was, and we ran and hid in the dairy; so the spell was broken, and the cake was no good. Another time, though, I and two or three other lasses cooked a red-herring, without speaking, and ate it all, head, tail, and everything. Then we walked upstairs backwards without a word, and backwards to bed. One girl broke the spell at the stair-foot, but the rest of us managed all right, and that night when I was asleep I saw G…… as plain as anything. He came with a great brown jug, and offered me a drink—that is the way the man you are bound to marry always shows himself. I had never seen him before, and never saw him again till years after, and then I nearly let the dish I had in my hands go slap into the floor at the sight of him, for I knew him again in a minute. I almost fainted away with it, and says I to myself, 'I will never marry the like of him', but you know how it ended."

From another source I learn that the quality of the vessel containing the draught offered by the spirit foreshows his position in life. If it should be common earthenware, he is poor; if china, he is fairly well supplied with the goods of this world; if a silver beaker, he is a man of great wealth.