Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/20

12 of you who heard Professor Rhys's paper on Manx folk-lore that he stopped short in his explanation of the superstition of the first-foot, because he had heard that, while in the Isle of Man it was attached to a dark man, elsewhere it was attached to a fair man. Of the examples where, on New Year's morning, it is held to be unlucky to meet a dark person, I may mention Lincolnshire, Durham, Yorkshire, and Northumberland. It is, on the contrary, lucky to meet, as first-foot, a dark-haired man in Lancashire, the Isle of Man, and Aberdeenshire. In these cases we get the element of "dark" or "fair" as the varying factor of the superstition; but instances in Sutherlandshire, the West of Scotland, and in Durham occur, where the varying factor rests upon the question of sex—a man being lucky and a woman being unlucky.

Similarly of the well-known superstition about telling the bees of the death of their owner, in Berkshire, Bucks, Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumberland, Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Monmouthshire, Notts, Northumberland, Shropshire, Somersetshire, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex, Wilts, Worcestershire, it appears that a relative may perform the ceremony, or sometimes a servant merely, while in Derbyshire, Hants, Northants, Rutland, and Yorkshire it must be the heir or successor of the deceased owner. Again, while in the above places the death of the owner is told to the bees, in other places it is told to the cattle; and, in other places, marriages as well as death are told to the bees.

In some cases the transfer from one object to another of a particular superstition is a matter of absolute observation. Thus, the labourers in Norfolk considered it a presage of death to miss a "bout" in corn or seed sowing. The superstition is now transferred to the drill, which has only been invented during the present century. Again, in Ireland it is now considered unlucky to give anyone a light for his pipe on May-day—a very modern superstition, apparently. But the pipe has been the means of pre-