Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/82

60 only in several parts of England but in Ireland, and among the North American Indians. To its firm hold in the city of Durham I can myself bear witness. When a boy I have seen persons endeavouring to discover the corpses of the drowned in this manner in the River Wear, near to Stoker’s Wall; and ten years ago the friends of one Christopher Lumley sought for his body in the Smallhope, near Lanchester, in the county of Durham, by the aid of a loaf of bread with a lighted candle in it. Indeed, the same means were practised in the autumn of the year 1860, within two miles of the city of Durham. A little child named Charles Colling fell into the Wear at Shincliffe, on the 21st of October in that year, and was drowned. His friends, after vainly trying the usual methods of finding the body, charged a loaf of bread with quicksilver, and floated it on the stream. Long and earnestly was its course watched, but all in vain; it floated onwards without pausing to mark the resting-place of the little child, and, though the body was ultimately recovered, it was by other means.

The old superstition, that no one can die in a bed containing the feathers of pigeons or game-fowl, can scarcely be called local, for we hear of it in many different parts of England. A Sussex Mrs. Gamp lately told the wife of her clergyman that never did she see any one die so hard as old Master Short, and at last she thought (though his daughter said there were none) that there must be game feathers in the bed. So she tried to pull it from under him, but he was a heavy man and she could not manage it alone, and there was no one with him but herself, and so she got a rope and tied it round him and pulled him by it off the bed, and he went off in a minute quite comfortable, just like a lamb. This old woman’s belief holds its ground in the North, and in Yorkshire the same is said of cock’s feathers. The Russian peasantry have a strong feeling, too, against using pigeon’s feathers in beds. They consider it sacrilegious, the dove being the emblem of the Holy Spirit. Some Yorkshire people declare that no one can die easy on any bed, and will lay a dying man on the floor, to facilitate the departure of the soul. It is remarkable that this is also a Hindoo and Mohamedan custom. In