Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/104

 88 Collectanea.

disappear, or the wearers were beaten with stinging-nettles. An oak tree was often called a shick-shack tree.

On April ist there was the usual custom of making everyone an April Fool. If anyone was made an April Fool after noon, they would say to him, —

" April Fool is gone and past, And you're the biggest fool at last. When April Fool comes again, You'll be the biggest fool then."

I was visiting some friends at Blackthorn near Bicester, when quite a little girl, and was awakened quite early one morning by a loud clanging noise. I was told they were "ringing the bees." This was done by beating a fire-shovel with a door key, and was intended to induce the queen bee to settle. It was said that, if the bees were not " rung," the owner could not claim them if they settled on another person's premises. Bees were seldom kept in the villages around Handborough.

Signs or tokens of death were firmly believed in, and there were many of them, such as a ' death tick,' — a ticking noise in the wall, the hooting of an owl, the howling of a dog, a blowfly buzzing about the house, the chirrupjMng of a cricket, and a " winding- sheet " or " shroud " in the candle (the guttering usually caused by a hair). Of three or four magpies seen together it was said, —

" One's a wedding, Two's mirth,.

Three's a berrin' (bnrying), Four's death."

It was a general belief that a person could not die if there were pigeon's feathers in the pillow on which he was lying. I have often known a friend or nurse of a person ' dying hard ' gently remove the pillow from under his head, saying, — "There maybe some pigeon's feathers in it." A person taken to see a dead body should always touch it, or it was thought he would dream of it. A cure for goitre, or 'full neck,' was to draw the hand of a corpse across it. There was a saying

" Happy is the corpse that the rain rains on, And happy is the bride that the sun shines on."

There was another curious custom which deserves mention.