Page:Over fen and wold; (IA overfenwold00hissiala).pdf/449

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On St. Mark's Eve, precisely at twelve o'clock, hold two pewter platters one over the other, take these to where bracken grows, hold the platters under the plants for the seeds to drop in, then you will find that the seeds will go right through the top platter and be caught in the one below; upon this "Samuel" will appear riding on a pig and tell you anything you want to know. Here is another charm. Kill a hedge-hog and smear two thorn-sticks with his blood, place these in a hedge-bottom and leave them there for fourteen days, if not moved mean-*while you will have your wish. I give these two charms as a fair sample of others, and I think they will well suffice!

Leaving Wispington, we came in about half a mile to a spot where four roads meet, a burial-place for suicides in times past, and reputed to be the centre of Lincolnshire. Then driving on we reached Horsington. In the register of burials here is a notice of "Bridget Hall buried in her own garden 16." She lived at Hail Farm near by, our friend told us, and directed in her will that she should be buried in her own garden, and that her body should be laid north and south, as she considered it "too Popish to be buried east and west in a churchyard!" Some years ago the then occupier of that farm, we further learnt, on digging a drain in the same garden came upon a skeleton lying north and south; presumably that of Bridget Hall.

In the vestry of the church here, according to our informant, used to be preserved in a box a