Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/314

286 seat by the fire as usual, and putting her pipe to her mouth bent down to the fire to light it. On observing this the ploughman, who had previously put a sixpence in the churn, stopped working, pressed the churn-staff hard down on the silver coin and kept it there. The witch ordered him to go on with his work. He stubbornly refused. She entreated; but he was inexorable. She cried out that she could not get her head up until he began; but begin he would not until she promised that he would have no difficulty with the butter. They were never troubled again by her at the Clermont.

Magpies.—In this district magpies, or pyets, as they are called, were dreaded as birds of ill-omen, even in the third decade of this century. Many people there were who, if they met, while on a journey, an unlucky number of these birds, would immediately turn back. A common rhyme ran thus:

Hare-lip.—It was also believed that if a pregnant woman stepped over "a cutty's clap," that is, a place where a hare had lain, her child, when born, would have "the hare-shach," or hare-lip. A laird in the neighbourhood, some seventy years ago, married his housekeeper. In harvest-time she went out to see what the reapers were doing, and heedlessly stepped over a cutty's clap. The reapers remonstrated with her, but, to show her contempt for their superstition, she forthwith stepped over it repeatedly. The child, when born, proved to be a daughter, and had no upper-lip at all. The laird's indignation at his wife's foolishness was unrelenting.