Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/105

Rh hung up in the cottages, and, when any illness breaks out in the family, a fragment is cut off, pounded, and given as medicine. Indeed, the superstition extends to America. In Florida it is held that three loaves baked on Good Friday and put into a heap of corn will prevent rats, mice, weevils, or worms from devouring it, In Suffolk, eggs laid on Good Friday are also kept with the greatest care by the farmers’ wives, who maintain that they will never go bad, and that a piece of such an egg gives immediate relief to a person suffering from colic.

The question has often been asked why the large black beetle is called “clock” in the North of England. An answer has reached me from Ireland, which, as it bears upon this day, I will note here—“Sure it told Judas the time.” On this account the Catholic peasantry in Ireland always crush beetles. I believe in Kent the creatures are called “the devil’s coach-horses,” and elsewhere “the devil’s footmen.”

All England over it is commonly said that one must put on something new on Easter Sunday, else the birds will spoil one’s clothes, or, as it stands in verse,

The belief that the sun dances at its rising on Easter morning peeps out in many parts of Yorkshire, as well as in Durham and Northumberland. Here, again, there is a singular correspondence between the Folk-Lore of the North and the West. Devonshire maidens get up to see the sun rise on Easter morning, as duly as do their northern sisters, though what they look for is the Lamb and flag in the centre of the sun’s disc. Poor women in the neighbourhood of Dartmoor have told me that they used, as girls, to go out in parties at sunrise to see the Lamb in the sun, and look at it through a darkened glass, and always some declared they saw it.

As to Easter eggs, they are as duly painted and gilded, and rolled on the greensward, throughout the North of England, as they are in Russia or Germany. They are also given as little offerings of goodwill by one person to another. I believe their