Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/417



Longfellow speaks

'Of the marvellous powers of four-leaved clover and horse-shoes'

as a superstition among the primitive settlers in Acadie, now Nova Scotia. And we have quoted M. Megnin's opinion that the apex of the ensign of a Roman cohort, figured on Trajan's column, was surmounted by a hoof-iron. If this be really a horse-shoe, it not only demonstrates that the custom of shoeing was known to the Romans, but that the strange virtues superstitiously attached to that object had already been credited by them; as it would also appear to have been by the Arabs in Mahomet's time.