Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/210

188 In the north-west of Scotland, according to Dr. Mitchell, the “gold and silver water” is the accredited cure for a child suffering from an evil eye. A shilling and a sovereign are put into water, which is then sprinkled over the patient in the name of the Trinity.

An eminent physician of Sunderland, the late Dr. Johnson, wrote to me thus respecting a little sufferer of that town, only four days before his own death:—“A case of necromancy occurred in this town some months ago. A child about eighteen months old, belonging to a working man at Southwick, was suffering from the wasting which accompanies scrofulous disease of the bowels, and presented the withered, haggard, weird appearance attributed to those smitten by the witch’s evil eye, or to the fairies’ changelings. The parents firmly believed the former to be the case, and sought counsel of a reputed charmer (Irish, I think) yet living in this town. He told them to come at midnight with the child to a room occupied by himself; and there a magic circle was drawn, lighted by candles placed round the circumference, and ornamented by chalk drawings, supposed by the people to be representations of planets. He took the naked child in his arms, stepped within the circle, repeated something (alleged to be the Lord’s Prayer backwards) three times over, anointed the breast and forehead of the child with some mysterious unguent, waved a magic wand over its head, addressed a sort of patron angel or imp in its behalf, and then pronounced the child whole and taken from under the evil spell. I find that a part of this superstition refers to a belief that the parents of sick children employ the ‘evil eye’ to transfer the disease from their own to other children, as well as to gratify malice or revenge. Within the last month a charge was seriously preferred against an elderly female for bewitching a child, about whom I was consulted; and there seemed to be a floating belief in the minds of the parents that the ‘evil eye’ had been cast upon it, not only because the witch had quarrelled with the father, but, because her own pigs being unhealthy, she had sought to transfer the sickness from her own stye to her neighbour’s nursery.”