Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/183

Rh that the sufferer should be wrapped in a blanket and laid in the sharp running stream which flowed a few yards from the cottage. This was done with full faith, though it was the depth of winter. Never shall I forget the poor victim as he turned his dying eyes on me and said, “Oh, Sir, I laid there twenty minutes, but could endure it no longer; and I just said, ‘Lift me out I’m dead.’ They took me out, and I’ve laid on this settle ever since.” A few days more, and the poor fellow had passed (as we humbly trust) to a better life, a sacrifice to one of the most cruel and heartless impostures I ever heard of. Had not death intervened, who can tell what further tortures might not have been in store for him at the hands of this ignorant and presuming monster?

The late Canon Humble communicated to me a story respecting the treatment of rheumatism in Dundee, widely different in its nature and results. A clergyman went to see an old woman of that place, who had not moved off her chair for years in consequence of severe rheumatism, which had settled in the knee. As is common among the poor, she would make the minister feel the painful swelling. I should add that he is a man of great muscular power, and not always aware of the force with which he uses it. He laid his hand on the part affected, and soon left the room to visit at some other tenements in the same row. Before he had gone his rounds in that quarter, he heard some one call him, and turning round, beheld his old friend up and about, loudly proclaiming that the priest’s touch had cured her. Certain it is, she has walked ever since.

Different again is the Sussex remedy of placing the bellows in the sufferer’s chair that he may lean against them and the rheumatics be charmed away.

Through the kindness of the Rev. T. H. Wilkinson, vicar of Moulsham, Chelmsford, I have been permitted to enrich this volume by extracts from a MS. book of old sayings and customs, jotted down by his father, once an inhabitant of Durham. In it