Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/47

Rh The Druinaw is a high hill skirting the sea in the east of Berwickshire. It was a bold flight of fancy to personify the rainbow, and endow him with a family of bairns; and the contrast is curious between the young Celt searching by the grey stone for the rainbow’s bairn, with “the tear-drop in his e’e,” and the Saxon boy running to catch the rainbow for the sake of the pot of gold at its foot.

The late Mr. Denham, a very careful collector of old sayings and old usages, says that he well remembers how he and his school-companions used, on the appearance of a rainbow, to place a couple of straws or twigs across on the ground, and, as they said, cross out the rainbow. The West Riding recipe for driving away a rainbow is, “Make a cross of two sticks and lay four pebbles on it, one at each end.”

The crow-charm is perhaps universal in our island:—

as well as the snail-charm—

though the latter more commonly runs in the South—

Our northern version is—

In Devonshire they have it—

and in the South of Italy,