Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/385

Rh building of such contrivances for keeping dairy products through the hot spells of summer.

Many curious old-world customs and beliefs, into which various natural objects entered, took root in the new soils though in a somewhat altered form to suit the changed conditions. Much of folk-lore has always been concerned with the weather. Besides the ember-days there was Candlemas with its superstition regarding the sunshine on that day as a prognostication of the remainder of winter. In Germany, if the badger saw his shadow it was an old belief that hard weather would follow for some time. No badger appearing on the Atlantic slope, the rôle of weather prophet was conferred upon the ubiquitous woodchuck or ground-hog whose honors are still fairly even with the weather bureau. So prominent a bird in European folk-lore as the cuckoo appears to have had no representative in this country to take its place, though we might regard the term "rain-crow," bestowed upon its American congener, as a somewhat vague recognition of kindred qualities. The art of the divining-rod in locating underground water migrated across the sea with these early settlers, and for this purpose a forked branch of the witch-hazel was used with as sure results, when held by a gifted hand, as that of the elm, the hazel or the willow of the old world. Unfortunately we can not trace the "witch" part of the name back to any certain source in the craft of the broomstick, and "hazel" is but a borrowed title. The shrub has much about it that is peculiar. Among our American underwoods its late autumnal bloom, at the fall of the leaf, and the ripening of its fruit in the next summer are conspicuous and may have appealed to the mystery-loving mind of the seventeenth century.

Superstition gathered about the strange whippoorwill and its weird twilight call. The Indian peoples, too, seem to have regarded this bird as one of omen and Catesby in his "Natural History of Carolina" quotes a piece of aboriginal folk-lore to the effect that the bird was unknown to them until after a certain battle when a great many of their people were slain by the Europeans, and that now the birds heard calling in the dusk are the souls of their ancestors. Many fragments of nature folk-lore sprang up in the new world from an old-world transplanting, as to the belief that swallows spent the winter in the mud of ponds and river, and other beliefs quite as curious which have gone into the limbo of the forgotten past.

In parts of the country, notably in the middle Atlantic region, the planting of plane trees (the sycamore or button wood) in the immediate vicinity of farm houses appears to have been a wide-spread custom under the belief that the tree warded off lightning. Whatever may have been the reason for its planting, this tree, with its huge bowl uplifting a crown of branches, and the striking color of its bark—white,