Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/158

 136 celo, ), I screen with a cloak); and so we find the wild huntsman, who, you see, is the storm, called Hackelnbärend, from Hekluberandi, the cloak-hearer.

“Now, in the first ages, there was no intention whatever of making the raging storm into a god, nor expressing a divine act in saying that the storm chased the sere leaves; yet, by degrees, the epithet Wôden was given form and figure, and became personified as a deity; then, too, the idea of the storm chasing the leaves became perverted into a myth representing Wôden as pursuing the yellow-haired wood-nymphs.”

But to return to auguries and portents. The mention of sneezings in the passage quoted in page 128 from Alcuin is remarkable, for here again a very early superstition holds its ground in the nineteenth century. Nurses in Durham, not to say mothers, still invoke a blessing on children when they sneeze; indeed, some extend the practice to adults. In Germany such is certainly the case. A young cousin of mine, lately at school in the Duchy of Wurtemburg, was greatly astonished to find that a fit of sneezing in which one of the professors indulged was responded to by a cry from all the pupils of “Gesundheit,” or “good health;” an attention which he seemed to expect as much as the Emperor Tiberius, who was extremely particular in requiring it from his courtiers. The practice comes from early pagan days. The ancient Greeks, in observing it, claimed to follow the example of Prometheus, who stole celestial fire to animate the beautiful figure he had made of clay; as the fire permeated its frame, the newly-formed creature sneezed, and the delighted Prometheus invoked blessings on it. At any rate the custom was of long standing in Aristotle’s days. St. Chrysostom names sneezing among other things of which people made a sign, and St. Eligius warns his flock to take no notice of it. It has, however, been noticed, and good wishes have been uttered on the occasion far and near, in Christendom and heathendom alike—in the remotest parts of Africa, and as far east as Siam. Clarke,