Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 6 1888.djvu/253

Rh though the custom is not so universal now as it was one hundred years ago.

At Balokali, a village near Constantinople, there is a sacred well. Visitors go there to eat fish fried on one side! The Greek patriarch comes once a year to plunge the Cross into the water. The sick, who have been lying all night on the floor of the church, are then sprinkled with the water, of which bottles are carried away for the cure of disease.

Bottles of water from the Jordan are believed to be of use to sick people, and the water of the well at Lourdes is now in great request.

Votive rags may be seen in the Island of Chalki (Sea of Marmora) stuck round the window of the cells where the hermits live who are resorted to as healers.

St. Lawrence's Well, Peterborough, and St. Edmund's Well, at Oxford, used to be visited.

The Vandals had a well at Glamutz to which they offered sacrifices. It was a giver of presages rather than of health.]

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The evil eye is very common. Children, cattle (milch cows), and poultry, suffer most from it. But the evil wishes, it is remarked, often fall back on the utterer, because to the "mischief" it is a matter of indifference on which of the two the spell or the wish falls.

[A Turkish nurse objects just as a Sutherland woman does to your looking at the baby. A pasha's daughter explained to a friend of mine that this was because of the evil eye.

I do not know if the Jews believe in the evil eye; but Offenbach, the composer, who was of Jewish extraction, was believed by Christians to have this horrid power, and was often avoided because of the jettatura.

Turquoises are said to be a preservative against it. I have never heard whether blue eyes or dark ones had the power of doing harm.]

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A woman, Ann Macrae, on this estate cures cows, &c., by incantations. She has a bag of stones as a "medicine," and a large