Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/346

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Miscellanea.

Never poke a person's fire till you have known them seven years.

(Claimed to be general by people present.)

Meeting anyone on stairs sign of quarrel before night. (Ditto.) Two spoons in sugar, or in one cup, sign of a wedding. (Ditto.) A loaf coming apart in your hand sign of a parting. (Ditto.) Very unlucky for the bride or bridegroom to come back when

started on the honeymoon. (Ditto.)

Crossed knives mean quarrel in family. (Ditto.)

Unlucky to have hair cut when moon wanes. (Ditto.)

If you turn your bed on Friday or Sunday, you turn away your

lover. (Ditto.)

Fall upstairs, sign of wedding. (Ditto.)

Stir the fire with the tongs stirs up anger. (Somerset.) To cut the nails on Friday brings very bad luck. (Somerset.) If you dry a letter by the fire, the answer will bring you bad news. (Told to my informant by one who had lived long in Yorkshire, and said by another person to be well known to be " unlucky" in Lancashire.)

In Cornwall, a friend tells me, they say "if a baby does not scream when baptised, the devil has not gone out of it", so they pinch it to make it scream.

A clergyman told me the following : " An old woman" (in Bristol, I believe) "told me there was a charm against toothache in the Bible. I expressed my surprise, but she assured me it was so, so I told her I should look. Next week I told her I could not find it anywhere, so she said, 'Yes, that's just it ; it's there certainly, but the more you look the more you can't find it, that 's how it always is.' "

The same clergyman told me the following : " Within the last thirty years there was a White Witch at Teignmouth (S. Devon). This White Witch was a man. When people went to him for advice, they took a live white duck as an offering. One old woman at Tor- cross, whom I knew well, whose husband was ill, said, ' I know what's the matter with him ; he 's " oversee'd", that 's what he is', and she walked to the White Witch at Teignmouth with a duck, to have her husband unbewitched. I knew of this being done by different people (one man who is alive now was one). The office of White Witch was hereditary. This man's father was White Witch before him."

Isabella Barclay.

I

Modern Greek Birth-Customs. — A Greek lady of Salonica supple- ments the information in Miss Garnett's Women of Turkey and their Folk-lore (Christian Women, pp. 69 etseq.) respecting the birth-customs she observed in the Greek community, as follows : —

When the baby is born, the third day the bed is arranged, the lady