Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/161

Rh the victim slug or snail may yet be seen impaled on its thorn-bush. Again, he may count the number of warts which torment him, put into a small bag an equal number of pebbles, and drop the bag where four roads meet. Whoever picks up the bag will get the warts. This charm is practised, too, in the West of England. It is sometimes varied by the substitution of a cinder applied to the warts and then tied up in paper. A third plan is to steal a piece of raw meat, rub the warts with it, and throw it away. Southey mentions this little charm in “The Doctor.” Did he learn it among the hills of Westmoreland? A fourth is to make as many knots in a hair as there are warts on the hands, and throw it away. A fifth is to apply eel’s blood. A sixth, to whisper to the wart: “If you do not go away in a week, I’ll burn you off with caustic.” Again, boys take a new pin, cross the warts with it nine times, and fling it over the left shoulder; or they prick the warts with a number of pins and stick the pins into an ash tree, believing that as the pins become embedded in the growing bark the warts will disappear. Or, again, they rub the warts with the skin from lard, and nail up the skin in the sun. This remedy is a very ancient one. Lord Bacon writes: “The taking away of warts by rubbing them with somewhat that afterwards is put to waste and consume, is a common experiment: and I do apprehend it the rather because of mine own experience. I had from my childhood a wart upon one of my fingers; afterwards when I was about sixteen years old, being then at Paris, there grew upon both my hands a number of warts, at the least a hundred, in a month’s space. The English ambassador’s lady, who was a woman far from superstitition, told me one day she would help me away with my warts: whereupon she got a piece of lard with the skin on, and rubbed the warts all over with the fat side; and amongst the rest that wart which I had had from childhood; then she nailed the piece of lard, with the fat towards the sun, upon a post of her chamber window, which was to the south. The success was that within five weeks’ space all the warts went quite away, and that wart which I had so long endured for company. But at the rest I did little marvel, because they came in a short time and might go away in a short time again; but the going