Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/365

Rh water; and one is always told that were the effects in the one case as dangerous as in the other, fishermen and sailors could not live.

Such are, or have been, some of the beliefs about the sea among the folk of the north-east of Scotland with respect to its health-giving powers.

OR poetical purposes, at any rate, Drayton was true to the belief of his age, touching witchcraft, astrology, and other allied arts. It is observable that in his Elegy on Lady Aston's departure for Spain, he ventures to rate the power of his own desire—psychic force, the spiritualists call it — respecting her good passage, as being equal in potency to the spells of Norwegian witches, who can sell winds that will steadily waft their sea-faring clients to a wished-for harbour. It may be, however, that this was but a temporary boldness, induced by hyperbole. Selden claims the same faculty for some "nuns" (as Drayton terms them) who, of yore, dwelt in the Seams,

and he refers to the wind-directing skill of Lapp and Finland witches in later times. "Mother Bumby," in her contribution to the fire-side tales told in the Mooncalf, enters into considerable detail as to the powers exercised by such weird women—