Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/101

 Rh An infant born with a caul has the gift of seeing spirits. The only way to prevent this is to keep the caul carefully as long as he (or she) lives, and not to let him (or her) ever see it.

A cradle must not be rocked while empty, or the child's death will soon make it empty indeed.

A cradle must not be moved by two persons. Two would move the child's coffin.

A child should not be laid on the table or measured, these acts being ominous of death.

If a sick child smiles as though recognising some one, it has been called, and will soon go to another world.

Baptism (by the mark of the cross) will make a child sleep better thereafter.

Baptism (by the mark of the cross) is a cure for sickness.

An infant must be carried upstairs before it has ever gone downstairs. Otherwise it will keep going down all its life.

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For warts.—Touch the wart with a stick, looking over your shoulder at the new moon. Then throw the stick away, and be careful not to look at the moon or the stick again that night.

Take stones and smear them with blood from the wart. Throw them away. Whoever steps on the stones will get the wart, and you will lose it.

For freckles.—Count them, and throw an equal number of pebbles in a paper. Whoever steps on the paper will get the freckles.

This list is by no means exhaustive, I presume. Indeed, it represents, more probably, but a very small part of what might be collected. Some of the above sayings have currency mainly in certain classes of adults, farm labourers, for. example, or nurses; others are of recent importation from remoter parts of the neighbouring states, and may not stay with us permanently; a few would rarely, if at all, be heard except among the negroes or the children; yet taking the past and