Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/179

Rh and polish the sickle. Lately, in the village of Stamfordham, a boy hurt his hand with a rusty nail. The nail was immediately taken to a blacksmith to file off the rust, and was afterwards carefully rubbed every day, before sunrise and after sunset, for a certain time; and thus the injured hand was perfectly healed.

How well this mode of treatment corresponds with that pursued by the Ladye of Buccleugh towards the wounded mosstrooper, William of Deloraine, as recounted by the Last Minstrel;

Probably Sir Walter Scott borrowed it as much from Border practice as from Border records. It seems in early days to have been very prevalent. Lord Bacon avers, “It is constantly received and avouched that the anointing of the weapon that maketh the wound will heal the wound itself,” ''Nat. Hist.'' cent. x. 998. And the “sympathetic powder,” which Sir Kenelm Digby prepared “after the Eastern method,” was applied by him to the bandages taken from the patient’s wound, not to the patient himself. This curious mode of treatment still lingers here and there. Not long ago it was practised on a hayfork in the neighbourhood of Winchester, and I lately heard a reference to it in Devonshire. A young relation of mine, while riding in the green lanes of that county, lamed his pony by its treading on a nail. He took the poor creature to the village blacksmith, who immediately asked for the nail, and, finding it had been left in the road, said, as he shook his head, “Ah, Sir, if you had picked it up and wiped it, and kept it warm and dry in your pocket, there’d have been a better chance for the pony, poor thing!”