Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/210

 200 Collectanea.

know. This was told me by two lads working on the place, who evidently believed it absolutely.

Some time ago I was told by a woman, who is now dead, that at the birth of a child the phase of the moon should be noted, as by that it was possible to foretell the sex of the next child. She went on to say that a lady living near would have a son born soon, and another neighbour would have a daughter — " I know, for I looked at the moon when their last children were born," she said. I must add that when the babies arrived they proved to be as she had prophesied. The story of a curious curse comes from the parish of S. Saviours. A family were cursed by a witch, the curse being that nothing that belonged to them should be straight ; the farmhouse is crooked, the trees that grow round the garden are very much so, and the five or six brothers and sisters who now are in possession of the place are all tiny and very deformed. I have been told that since the place was cursed it has always been

so.n

There is an old house on the S. Peterport side of the hill above Havilland Vale which was troubled, many years ago, by a ghost. A woman used to come from the house at night, walk down the garden, stand at a certain place wringing her hands, and then dis- appear. This went on for many years till some workmen were building a wall bordering the garden, and one day they began talking about it. A certain Pierre Thovvme, a mason, who lived between the Vallon and the Courtes Fallaize, decided to return that evening to see if he could lay the ghost. He was a very good old man and he took with him his Bible, a lantern, and a walking stick ; when he arrived at the garden he had to wait awhile before he saw a figure leave the house and pass down the path ; he fol- lowed it and at the place where it disappeared he dug in his stick, and leaving it there to mark the spot he returned home.

The next day he told his fellow workmen what he had seen, and showed them the marked place, and they decided to dig there and see if anything could be found to account for the ghost always stopping there. They dug deeply befor^ they came upon the skeleton of a baby ; they took the bones out most carefully, and deciding that the mother must have buried the baby there and then have been overcome with remorse because it was uncon-