Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/271

Rh mother repairs to church along with her infant to be blessed by the pastor; but before so doing she is careful to seek the nearest well and throw down a piece of bread into its depths, probably as an offering to the Brunnenfrau supposed to reside in each water, and who is said to lure little children down to her.

With these first four weeks the greatest perils of infancy are considered to be at an end; but no careful mother will fail to observe the many little customs and regulations which alone will insure the further health and well-being of her child.

Thus she will always remember that the baby may only be washed between sunrise and sunset, and that the bathing-water may not be poured out into the yard at a place where any one can step over it, which would entail sickness or death, or at the very least deprive the child of its sleep.

Two children which can not yet speak must not be allowed to kiss each other, or neither of them will ever learn to talk.

A book laid under the child's pillow will make it an apt scholar; and the water in which a young puppy has been washed, if used for the infant's bath, will cure it of all skin-diseases.

Whoever steps over a child as it lies on the ground will cause it to die within a month. Other prognostics of death are to rock an empty cradle, to make the child dance in its bath, or to measure it with a yard-measure before it can walk.

Death, to the Saxon peasants, appears in the light of a treacherous enemy, who must be met with open resistance, and may be conquered by courageous opposition or conciliated with a bribe. "He has put off death again with a slice of bread," is said of a man who has unexpectedly survived some great danger.

When the first signs of an approaching illness declare themselves in a man, all his friends are strenuous in advising him to hold out against it, not to let himself go, but to grapple with this foe which has seized him unawares. Even though all the symptoms of typhus fever be already upon him, though his head be burning like fire, and his limbs heavy as lead, he is yet exhorted to bear up against it, and on no account to let himself lie down, for that would be a concession to the enemy.

In this way many a man goes about with death upon his face, determined not to give in, till he drops at last senseless in the field or yard where he has been working till the last moment.

Even then his family are not disposed to let him rest. With well-meaning but mistaken kindness, they endeavor to rouse him by shouting in his ear. He must be made to wake up and walk about, or it will be all over with him; and not for the world would they send for a doctor, who can only be regarded as an omen of approaching death.

Some old woman versed in magic formulas, and learned in the