Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/176

154 infallible cure. The shock to the nervous system from that terrible night was so great that she did not rally for some months, and eventually she died from the wen. This happened about the year 1853, under the cognisance of my informant, the Rev. Canon Tristram. This belief extended, not many years back, as far south as Sussex. “Some five-and-twenty years ago,” writes the Sussex lady, to whom I am so much indebted, “there stood a gibbet within sight of the high road that wound up Beeding Hill, our nearest way to Brighton. . . . . Among my nurse’s fearful stories about it was one relating to the curing of a wen by the touch of the dead murderer’s hand, and she described most graphically the whole frightful scene: how the patient was taken under the gallows in a cart, and was held up in order that she might reach the dead hand, and how she passed it three times over the wen and returned home cured. This practice has happily become extinct with the destruction of the gibbet; but the remedy of a dead hand is still sometimes resorted to. Not very long ago, in the neighbouring village of Storrington, a young woman afflicted with goitre was taken by her friends to the side of an open coffin in order that the hand of the corpse might touch it thrice.” It may be observed that they say in North Germany that tetters and warts disappear if touched by the hand of a corpse.

Another friend, the Rev. J. Cundill, tells me how, while he was fishing a short time ago in Stainsby Beck, in Cleveland, a peasant came along the stream in search of a “wick” (anglicè, quick or live) trout, to lay on the stomach of one of his children who was much troubled with worms, a trout so applied being a certain cure for that complaint. A different mode of treatment was made known to me, in the autumn of 1863, by the fireside of my landlady’s kitchen at Sprouston, by the Tweedside, after a long day’s fishing. I was informed that water in which earthworms had been boiled was an infallible remedy in such a case. I ventured to demur to its efficacy, on which the old woman broke out, “Bless me, Mr. Henderson! will ye no believe that? Why, wasn’t Jeanie Wright fair brought back frae the grave when she was as gude as dead? A’ the doctors had gi’en her up, but there