Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/400

 370 industrial population. The dark practices of magic are known among them; the simpler faith in apparitions is comparatively less flourishing. The country waggoner, shepherd, or cowman, gets up in the small hours and tramps alone through the misty darkness to the silent yard or building where he must "fettle" his charges before the world—even the labouring world—is astir. Small wonder if his fancy conjures up strange spectres in the shadowy corners. Compare with this the habits of the colliers, for example. Till the present generation they kept equally early hours, but they go to their work in parties, through roads generally more or less lighted by the glow of neighbouring iron-furnaces. They do not imagine ghosts at every turn; but what they do, or did, fear in these early journeys is meeting a woman. If such a meeting should take place, all orthodox old colliers would turn back and refuse to go down the pit that day; for it was considered a sure sign of death. Their dangerous occupation, so liable to sudden alarms and accidents, disposes them, and still more their wives, to put great faith in omens, or as they say "tokens." To dream of fire portends a fire in the pit, to dream of a broken shoe is a sure sign of danger. A woman at Bilston waiting alone one evening for her husband's return from his nightly visit to the public-house, heard his hobnailed boots taken up and dropped violently on the floor three times in succession. She begged him, when he came in, not to go to work next day; but he would not listen to her, went, and in a few hours' time was brought home fatally injured by a fall of coal in the pit. The miners had also (I quote from Mr. G. T. Lawley, editor of the Bilston Mercury) a superstition known by the name of the Seven Whistlers. They believed that if these were heard about the mouth of a pit (and some of them used to hear, or pretend to hear them) there was sure to be a fatal accident if the colliers continued at work, and they straightway left off for the day. If the