Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/126

118 offered to buy them. "Ha'nt got 'em—used to't—but there—'twer loike this yer. My poor buoy^he wer turble bad, and he pined like a'ter they wold things. And ther—I thought myself how thick brass dog a noiil'd ower door 'd do en a power o' good.' And 'noiil'd ower door' it was found."

[This remarkable "find," which was made in Belbury Camp, near Higher Lytchett, Poole, is fully described in Archæologia, Vol. xlviii. pp. 1-6, where the objects are figured. Mr. Franks was of opinion that the ornamentation on the bull resembled Etruscan, but that the article itself "was late-Celtic." Its use as recently as 1881 as a prophylactic is surely an extremely interesting fact to students of folk-lore.]

"There stood by the cross His mother. Now there grew on Calvary a green-leaved plant with flowers of deep azure blue, but the buds were red. St. Mary's eyes were as blue as the flowers, but with weeping her eyelids were as red as the buds. And as she wept the tears fell on the leaves and spotted them. And spotted they have been from generation to generation ever since, and the plant is grown in cottage gardens, and its name is Mary's Tears. But books call it Pulmonaria."

[We are reminded in Black's Folk-Medicine that blue is the sky colour, the Druids' sacred colour, and the Virgin's colour; but I find no reference to this beautiful legend in the above-named work, where one would expect to meet with it. Dorset, probably, does not possess a monopoly of it, and doubtless members will be able to furnish other examples.]

"Folks hold to the belief that St. Austin's Well, hard by Ceme Abbas, still works wondrous cures. I have had a case told in all detail while sketching the lovely spring."

Of course there are wishing-wells everywhere, although few so clear and full as that at Upwey. But in St. Catherine's Chapel, high on a hill by Abbotsbury—one of the most interesting of fifteenth-century buildings in these parts, by the way—in St. Catherine's are wishing-holes. They are in the south doorway. You put your knee in one hole and your hands in two others, and wish.