Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/411

 the word ferrant is added to the title of the former (Maréchal ferrant).

Some strange superstitions are allied with horse-shoes and horse-shoeing, but chiefly with the shoes. It is impossible to fix the age of many of these curious fancies, but they appear to belong to the remotest antiquity—to be coeval, indeed, with the early mysteries, and to have held their ground long after these had disappeared, descending from one age to another, until they have even reached our own day. Finding a horse-shoe, and nailing it to a door or other place in order to keep away witches or ill-luck, is one of those frailties of the human mind not alone confined to the West, but ranging over a large extent of the earth's surface.

Burnes, in travelling through Central Asia, remarks: 'Passing a gate of the city, I observed it studded with horse-shoes, which are as superstitious emblems in this country as in remote Scotland. A farrier had no customers: a saint to whom he applied recommended his nailing a pair of horse-shoes to a gate of the city. He afterwards prospered, and the farriers of Peshawur have since propitiated the same saint by a similar expedient, in which they place implicit reliance.'

Aubrey tells us that in his time 'it is very common to nail horse-shoes over the thresholds of doors, which is to hinder the power of witches that enter into the house. Most houses of the West-end of London