Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/178

156 coffins, made up and worn as finger-rings, are deemed efficacious in the West Riding. So they are in Cleveland. An old watchmaker at Stokesley, Robert Stevenson by name, used to cure “scores of people” that way. But he confided to his choice friends that he never really made up the coffin-tyre they brought him: he took it from them, but it was less trouble to give them rings which he had by him.

This may, perhaps, be a not unsuitable place for introducing an instance of Devonshire superstition, so peculiar that it seems worthy of record. It was related to my fellow-worker by her friend the late Dr. Walker, of Teignmouth, a physician of some local celebrity. Within the last twenty years he had under his care a poor woman of that place, who was suffering from an extensive sore on the breast. When he visited her one day he was surprised to find the entire surface of the wound strewn over with a gritty substance, and a good deal of inflammation set up in consequence. In some displeasure he asked what they had been putting on, but for a long time he could get no answer beyond “Nothing at all, Sir.” The people about were sullen, but the doctor was peremptory; and at last the woman’s husband, rolling a mass of stone from under the bed, muttered, in genuine Devonshire phrase, “Nothing but Peter’s stone, and here he is!” On further inquiry it appeared that, incited by the neighbours, who had declared his wife was not getting well as she should, the poor fellow had walked by night from Teignmouth to Exeter, had flung stones against the figures on the west front of the cathedral (which is called St. Peter’s by the common people), had succeeded at last in bringing down the arm of one of them, and had carried it home in triumph. Part of this relic had been pulverised, mixed with lard, and applied to the sore. I have never met with another instance of the kind, but doubtless it is not a solitary one. If the practice was ever general, we need not lay to the charge of Oliver Cromwell’s army all the dilapidation of the glorious west front of Exeter Cathedral.

The treatment of surgical cases in the North by no means corresponds to that pursued by the faculty. When a Northumbrian reaper is cut by his sickle, it is not uncommon to clean