Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/64

42 claimed a kiss on receiving it. I am told that on one occasion the bride, being a Methodist, refused, from conscientious scruples, to give the ribbon. There was much dissatisfaction through the place, and the youths revenged themselves after the traditional manner of punishing stingy brides. They fired the stithy at her; that is, they placed a charge of gunpowder in the stith, or anvil of the blacksmith’s shop, and fired it as she passed on her way from church.

In the neighbourhood of Leeds, and I believe in the North of England generally, it is counted unlucky for a young woman to attend church when her banns are published; her children run the risk of being deaf and dumb. But there is no chance at all of a family unless, when she retires on the wedding-night, her bridesmaids lay her stockings across. Again, when a woman’s hair grows in a low point on the forehead, it is supposed to presage widowhood, and is called a “widow’s peak.”

I may close our collection of bridal Folk-Lore by two little sayings rife in the county of Durham. The first of the bridal pair to go to sleep on the wedding-night will be the first to die; and the wife who loses her wedding ring incurs the loss of her husband’s affection. The breaking of the ring forebodes death. This belief holds ground as far south as Essex, where, in 1857, a farmer’s widow, on being visited after her husband’s death, exclaimed, ”Ah! I thought I should soon lose him, for I broke my ring the other day; and my sister, too, lost her husband after breaking her ring—it is a sure sign.” An old woman of Barnoldby-la-Beck, Lincolnshire, whose husband died on the fiftieth anniversary of their wedding-day, told her vicar that she had known he would die before her. “Why so?” asked he. “Because when we were married at church he knelt down first at the altar, and they always say the one that kneels down first at the marriage will die first.” At a Basque wedding the husband is bound to kneel down on a fold of his wife’s dress.

The portents of death related in the Wilkie MS. are numerous indeed. Thus, he who meets a Border funeral is certain soon to die, unless he bares his head, turns, and accompanies the