Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/91

 Rh in the bottom row in Fig. 8, are quite well understood, although their descriptions are somewhat crude. Pendants of tusks or of the canine teeth of some animal, such as the four shown in the top row in Fig. 8, are, I am told, largely bought as a protection by men who tend wild animals in shows etc. The middle object in the top row is a cornelian mounted in metal and worn by Jewesses as a charm against the evil eye, and the second row consists of a boot, two canine teeth, and a tusk. Any charm which is of uncertain use is invariably said to be "for luck." Fossil belemnites and nodules of iron pyrites are always called "thunderbolts."

I failed to trace any "thunderbolts" in Rome or Naples, but found tusks and teeth as pendants in great quantities, as well as phallic amulets in coral, shell, bone, and metal. The latter amulets are so common in London also that I am inclined to think that they are probably brought here by the numerous Neapolitans who seek to supply us with chestnuts in winter, ice-cream in summer, and music in both. In Naples such amulets are often seen in wear, and almost every shop for the poor has, hanging up, one or more evil-eye charms, such as a glove stuffed and with the two middle fingers and thumb stitched to the palm, so that the other fingers make the sign of the horns, or mano cornuto. The horns and such like are also bought for the horses and carts of the peasants, which are sometimes so bedecked with amulets as to look like small travelling museums. In Rome a typical cart amulet is a ram's horn painted blue and with a little bell at its tip. In one of the poorest alleys of Rome, also, I met an itinerant seller of some sort of sweet stuff who had suspended, from the shoulder cord which supported his tray, the core of a goat's horn, shown as the second object from the right in the top row of Fig. 9, as an evil-eye charm. Without any words, but with the Esperanto of half a franc, I acquired this specimen, and left him gazing after me with surprise; perhaps I was in his fancy a proper candidate for a lunatic asylum owing to my lavish expenditure.

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