Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/118

96 The 29th of May is marked in Fishlake and its neigbourhood as the close of the birds’-nesting season. The boys think it unlucky to take nests later, and religiously abstain from doing so.

There is an old saying in the North about St. Michael’s Day: “So many days old the moon is on Michaelmas Day, so many floods after.” I am not aware that the Irish custom of abstaining from blackberries after this day extends to the North of England, but I have come across it in Devonshire. The saying in Ireland is this: “At Michaelmas the devil puts his foot on the blackberries.” On the Tweed side, although no mention is made of St. Michael’s Day, yet it is held that late in the autumn the devil throws his club over the blackberries and renders them poisonous or at least unwholesome. The Rev. R. O. Bromfield informs me that a boy once related to him circumstantially that he had seen this done, and that the club had come thundering over an old dyke and among the brambles just beside him, effectually putting an end to his feast off their berries. In Sussex the 10th of October is fixed as the limit of blackberrying, and they say that the devil then goes round the country and spits on the bramble-bushes! Note that the 10th of October is “Old Michaelmas Day.” It is also held in that county a dangerous thing to go out nutting on Sunday for fear of encountering the evil one, though he often comes to the nutters in friendly guise and holds down the branches for them to strip. The devil in his character of nut-gatherer has plainly taken hold of the popular imagination in Sussex, for a proverb is current there, “As black as the de’il‘s nutting-bag.” In Yorkshire this festival is called “hipping day,” from its connection with a confection of hips, the red berries of the wild rose.

How All-Hallowe’en is kept in Scotland, English readers well know from Burns’s poem on the subject. It is an evening of mirth and hilarity, and many divinations into futurity take place during its mystic hours. The Wilkie MS. mentions some of these which are not named by Burns, but as they may also be practised on the eves of Christmas, New Year’s Day, and Midsummer Day, they will be more properly ranged under the head of “Divinations into Futurity.” Ordeal by fire and water are,