Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/219

 Rh The jingles which follow are often repeated by Cornish nursemaids with appropriate actions to amuse their little charges. First, touching each part of the face as mentioned with the forefinger,

Second—

Here the two little feet are struck lightly one against the other.

Children with rickets were taken by their parents on the three first Sundays in May to be dipped at sunrise in one of the numerous Cornish holy wells, and then put to sleep in the sun; this was thought to strengthen them. Small pieces torn from their clothes were left on the bushes to propitiate the pixies; or for the same disease they were passed nine times through a Mên-an-tol (holed stone). A man stood on one side, and a woman on the other, of the stone. The child was passed with the sun from east to west, and from right to left; a boy from the woman to the man, a girl from the man to the woman. This order is always, in these charms, strictly observed. As lately as 1883, in the village of Sancred, West Cornwall, a little girl, suffering from whooping-cough, was passed from a man to a woman nine times under a donkey's belly; a little boy standing the while at the donkey's head feeding it with "cribs" of wheaten bread. My informant did not know if on this occasion any incantation was repeated. Another family, he tells me, some years back were in the same neighbourhood cured of the whooping-cough by donkey's hair, which was dried on the baking iron of the open hearth, reduced to powder, and administered to them. There are very various ways of