Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/91

Rh This superstition is unfortunately fast passing away in all three countries, but you still hear of it, especially in the Isle of Man, after some mischief has been done. Thus a good Manx scholar told me how a relative of his in the Ronnag, a small valley near South Barrule, had carted the earth from an old burial-ground on his farm and used it as manure for his fields, and how his beasts died afterwards. The narrator said he did not know whether there was any truth in it, but everybody believed that it was the reason why the cattle died; and so did the farmer himself at last: so he desisted from completing his disturbance of the old site. It is possibly for a similar reason that a house in ruins is seldom pulled down and the materials used for other buildings: where that has been done misfortunes have ensued: at any rate, I have heard it said more than once. I ought to have stated that the nondisturbance of antiquities in the Island is quite consistent with their being now and then shamefully neglected as elsewhere: this is now met by an excellent statute recently enacted by the House of Keys for the preservation of the public monuments in the Island.

Of the other and more purely Manx superstitions I may mention one which obtains among the Peel fishermen of the present day: no boat is willing to be third in the order of sailing out from Peel harbour to the fisheries. So it sometimes happens that after two boats have departed, the others remain watching each other for days, each hoping that somebody else may be reckless enough to break through the invisible barrier of 'bad luck'. I have often asked for an explanation of this superstition, but the only intelligible answer I have had was that it has been observed that the third boat has done badly several years in succession; but I am unable to ascertain how far that represents a fact. Another of the unlucky things is to have a white stone in the boat, even in the ballast, and for that I never could get any explanation at all; but there is no doubt as to the fact of this superstition, and I may illus-