Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/127

 Rh mow, and the sower must escape before the scythe reaches her, else some accident will happen. I remember as well as if it were only last night, just as I came downstairs in my night-clothes, the young woman came rushing upstairs in a great fright, and never did I get over the ground so quickly in my life as I did when I followed her. She thought she saw a figure coming after her.”

A new-laid egg offers another means of diving into futurity. On New Year’s Eve, perforate with a pin the small end of the egg, and let three drops of the white fall into a basin of water. They will diffuse themselves on the surface into fantastic shapes of trees, &c. From these the initiated will augur the fortunes of the egg-dropper, the character of his wife, number of his children, and so forth. This is still practised in Denmark, where also, as a variety, the girls will melt lead on New Year’s Eve, and, pouring it into water, observe the next morning what form it has assumed. If it resembles a pair of scissors, she will inevitably marry a tailor; if a hammer, her husband will be a smith, and so on.

A Yorkshire schoolmaster tells me the following tale of fortune-telling in that county. He learnt it from the wife of an intimate friend, and gives it in her words: “My sister and I made it up one day to go to the fortune-telling woman, so we went the next Sunday afternoon, and found a good many young men and women there for the same purpose. When my turn came to go into the room (for each person was let in alone) the old creature bid me get into bed and then gave me something like a hen’s egg made of glass. She covered me over with the bed-clothes and told me to look in the glass. Presently she asked me whether I saw anything. I said no, for there was nothing to be seen; but directly a light seemed to break out in the glass and I saw a row of three houses with a kind of shed at one end, and in a moment a man came out of the house next the shed, went past the other houses, and disappeared down a road. I noticed that he wore a blue coat and yellow buttons. Some three months afterwards my sister and I came here on a visit to an old friend of my father’s; we had never been here before. On