Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/42

20 mamma first; in the former case it will be a boy, in the latter a girl. If a child tooths first in its upper jaw, it is considered ominous of death in infancy.

Much importance attaches to the baby’s first visit to another house, on which occasion it is expected that he should receive three things an egg, salt, and white bread or cake; the egg a sacred emblem from the remotest antiquity, and the cake and salt things used alike in Jewish and in pagan sacrifices. Somewhat grotesquely they add in the East Riding of Yorkshire a fourth thing—a few matches to light the child on the way to heaven. These votive offerings must be pinned in the baby’s clothes, and so brought home. I have heard an old woman in Durham speak of this as the child receiving alms. “He could not claim them before he was baptized,” she said, “but now he is a Christian he has a right to go and ask alms of his fellow-Christians.” Near Leeds this ceremony is called “puddening.”

Scotch nurses note with which hand a child first takes up a spoon to sup. If it be the left you may be sure that he will be an unlucky fellow all his life. So says the author of the Wilkie MS. He adds, that the women who live on the banks of the Ale and Teviot have a singular custom, of wearing round their necks blue woollen threads or small cords till they wean their children. They do this for the purpose of averting ephemeral fevers, or, as they call them, “weeds and onfas.” These threads are handed down from mother to daughter, and esteemed in proportion to their antiquity. “I possess,” he says, “one of these myself, which was given me by a woman in the farm of Caverse, near Melrose, and I remarked that all the nursing mothers in that district wore a similar thread.” Possibly these threads had originally received some blessing or charm. In Dundee people are accustomed to wear round the loins for the cure of lumbago a hank of yarn which has been charmed by a wise woman; and girls may be seen with single threads of the same round the head and temples as an infallible specific for tic-douloureux. I have not been able to learn the form of incantation. It is practised by Highlanders.