Page:Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports, Etc., with an Appendix Containing a Rare Tract.djvu/263

 supposed to inhale the child's life, and disease soon follows. When we desire a cat to stay at home, we must grease its feet with new butter and it will not wander away. Again:—a witch and a cat are always good company. Their natures are much alike; and hence, they help to form a portion of every "load of mischief."

Superstitious observances respecting the health and preservation of

CHILDREN very numerous, and are constantly practised in our nurseries and cottages. Young children are often reminded that they ought not to walk backwards in a room, or on a road;—if they do, death will soon deprive them of their mothers. Many persons consider it sinful to give a child the same Christian name as another who is dead: one female remarked to the writer that "id wor gooin ageean God Omeety as hed ta'en't'other away." A child with two crowns, or two circular tufts of hair, will live in two kings' reigns. Very few nurses will convey a child down-stairs the first time it is removed from the room; they always carry it up a few steps, if possible, towards the attic, in order that it may hereafter rise in the world. For want of other means the nurse sometimes mounts a chair with the child in her arms. The belief in changelings is not yet extinct; especially amongst the lower Irish population.

A person now living in Burnley firmly believed that her withered, consumptive child was a changeling. She told the writer that it would not live long; and when it died, she said "the fairies had got their own." Our peasantry also hold that unbaptized children neither