Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/172

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And the Ceronsepel coming in at the town end, By the name of the Lord I medisen thee.”

After this, who shall congratulate himself on the decay of superstition as a thing of the past?

Ague is a disease which has always been deemed peculiarly open to the influence of charms. It is said in Devonshire that you may give it to your neighbour, by burying under his threshold a bag containing the parings of a dead man’s nails, and some of the hairs of his head; your neighbour will be afflicted with ague till the bag is removed. In Somersetshire and the adjoining counties, the patient shuts a large black spider into a box, and leaves it to perish; in Flanders he imprisons it between the two halves of a walnut-shell, and wears it round his neck; in Ireland he swallows it alive. The Sussex peasant imprisons a caterpillar, and carries it about in his pocket, confident that as the poor insect wastes away the ague-fits will diminish in violence. He has the alternative of wearing tansy leaves in his shoes, or eating sage leaves, fasting for nine mornings consecutively. Flemish Folk-Lore enjoins any one who has the ague to go early in the morning to an old willow, make three knots in one of its branches, and say “Good morrow, Old One; I give thee the cold; good morrow, Old One.” Compare with this a mode of cure practised in Lincolnshire. It was thus described by one who had suffered from the disease, and tried the remedy in her young days. She was an old woman when her clergyman, the Rev. George Ornsby, wrote it down in her own words. I may add that she has but recently died:

“When I wur a young lass, about eighteen years auld, or thereabouts, I were living sarvant wi’ a farmer down i’ Marshland (borders of Lincolnshire). While I were there I were sorely ’tacked wi’ t’ague, and sorely I shakked wi’ it. Howsomever, I got mysen cured, and I’ll tell ye how it were. They were on mawing, and I hed to tak t’dinner t’it men ’at were mawing i’ t’ field. Sae I went wi’ t’ dinner, and ane o’ t’ men were an auld man, and while he were sitting o’ t’ grass eating him dinner, I were stood looking at him, and talking t’him, and shakking all t’ time. ‘Young woman,’ says he, ‘ye’ve gotten t’ shakking (a