Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/160

 152 THE FOLK-LORE OF DRAYTON.

Then sprinkles she the juice of rue, That groweth underneath the yew, With nine drops of the midnight dew,

From lunary distilling. The molewarp's brain mixt therewithall, And with the same the pismire's gall; For she in nothing short would fall,

The fairy was so willing."

The first two lines of this passage are a little obscure, and I can only say of them that fern-seed was supposed to make the bearer of it invisible,* and that the viscous berry of the mistletoe — bird-lime in short — might be a sore let and hindrance if placed in the way of tiny Puck. I think we have here something like a travesty of the modus operandi of professed witches. Nightshade, rue^ influenced by the gloomy baleful yew, the mystic nine drops of the midnight dew of lunary, contributions from those underground workers the mole and ant,"!" are all suggestive of darkness and concealment, and might reasonably be employed by a believer in the doctrine of sympathies or signatures who aimed at making a detective lose his way, and at hiding those of whom he was in quest. It seems likely that vervain and dill were used with a view of counteracting any magical arts of which Puck might be availing himself. Besides all this, Nymphidia

" thrice under a brier doth creep, Which at both ends was rooted deep, And over it three times she leapt."

I can only guess at the object of these gymnastics. To pass suffering mortals through holes in stones, or through cleft ash-trees, was, indeed I suppose I might say is, a popular practice in some parts of England.^ A Cornish remedy for boils is for the patient to creep under an

Hen. TV. act i. sc. 2) to the Chamberlain, who shrewdly replies, " Nay, by my faith, I think you are more beholding to the night than to fern-seed for your walking invisibly,"
 * " We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible," says Gadshill (1.?^

t The mole is still moudiwarp (the earth-caster) with many Englishmen, and I have heard an old lady, a Yorkshirewoman, I believe, call an ant a pissimire, I do not find the word, however, in any of the Yorkshire glossaries of the E.D.S.

X See, for one work, Brand's Popular Antuiuities (Bohn's edition), vol. iii. pp. 287, 289-293.