Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/166

144 informs me, to seat the patient on a donkey with its face towards its tail, and give him a roast mouse to eat. It is hardly necessary to say that he must not know what he is eating. The same practice has prevailed in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. A Sussex remedy, said to be very efficacious, is to hang round the patient’s neck the excrescence often found upon the briar-rose, and locally called Robin redbreast’s cushion.

Another mode of cure for this scourge of childhood prevails in the North of Ireland. A lady residing in the county of Derry, my own near relation, tells me that a short time ago her servants summoned her out of doors to see a stranger who was peering about in the yard but would not speak to any of them. She went and found a respectable middle-aged woman, apparently a farmer’s wife, who, seeing her to be the mistress of the house, eagerly went up and prayed her to save her child. In answer to the lady’s inquiries the woman said, “My child is dying of whooping-cough; the doctors can do nothing more, so I went to a skilled man, and he told me to fill a small bottle with milk and take it to a house I had never visited before. I must cross the water three times to get to it, and must speak no word by the way till I see the master or the master’s wife of this strange house. Then I must tell my tale and ask whether they keep a ferret. If they do I must pour the milk in a saucer, see the ferret drink half of it, return the other half into the bottle, take it home and give it to the child. He will drink it and be cured at once. Now I see you have ferrets, let me have one at once. I have been out so many days and have not been able to find a strange house where they kept them.” My friend, as kindly as she could, endeavoured to disabuse the poor woman’s mind of this strange superstition, but a belief in it was deeply rooted in her mind.

Since I received this narration I find that something similar holds its ground in my own county. The following instance was communicated to me by the late Rev. J. W. Hick, of Byer’s Green: “A boy came into my kitchen the other day with a basin containing a gill of new milk, saying his mother hoped I would let my son’s white ferret drink half of it, and then he would take the other half home to the bairn to cure its cough. I found the