procedure prescribed in North Germany. If a person has wounded himself, let him cut, in an upward direction, a piece from a branch of a fruit-tree, and apply it to the recent wound so that the blood may adhere to it, and then lay it in some part of the house where it is quite dark, when the bleeding will cease. Or, when a limb has been amputated, the charmer takes a twig from a broom, and presses the wound together with it, wraps it in the bloody linen, and lays it in a dry place, saying,—
The wounds of our Lord Christ
They are not bound;
But these wounds they are bound,
In the name, &c.[1]
My friend the late Canon Humble told me of a strange Irish belief which he learnt from a poor woman whom he visited in sickness, that a fox’s tongue was a specific for extracting obstinate thorns. “A neighbour of hers, she said, broke a very long thorn into the ancle joint. The doctor tried poultices and everything he could think of without result. She sent her fox’s tongue. It was applied at night, and in the morning the thorn was found lying beside it, having come out in the night. The woman added that it was so valuable that in the long run she lost it through the cupidity of her neighbours.”
The sympathy assumed between the cause of an injury and the victim is in Durham held strongly to exist between anyone bitten by a dog and the animal that inflicted the bite. An inhabitant of that city recently informed me, that, having been bitten in the leg by a savage dog about a month before, he took the usual precautions to prevent ultimate injury, but without satisfying his friends, more than twenty of whom had seriously remonstrated with him for not having the dog killed. This alone, they said, would insure his safety; otherwise, should the dog hereafter go mad, even years hence, he would immediately be attacked with hydrophobia. These persons were of the
- ↑ Thorpe’s Mythology, vol. iii. p. 162.
