As to twins, a strong sympathy is believed to exist between them, so that what gives pain or pleasure to the one is suffered or enjoyed by the other as well. Should one die, however, the other, though weakly before, will at once improve in health and strength, the life and vital energy of his fellow being added to his own.
This curious belief recalls to the memory how, in Spenser’s “Faerie Queene,” Agapé, the mother of three brave knights,
Borne of one mother in one happie mold,
Borne at one burden in one happie morne,
visits the three Fates that she may learn the length of her sons’ lives, and finding the thread of their existence
So thin as spiders’ frame,
And eke so short that seemed their ends out shortly came,
finding also that no prayer of hers could avail to lengthen their allotted span, she asked and obtained the following request:
“Then since,” quoth she, the “terme of each man’s life,
For nought may lessened or enlarged be;
Grant this: that when ye shred with fatall knife
His life, which is the eldest of the three,
Which is of them the shortest, as I see,
Eft soones his life may pass into the next;
And when the next shall likewise ended bee,
That both their lives may likewise be annext
Unto the third, that his may so be trebly wext.”[1]
While speaking of twins, I may perhaps mention that in Sussex a “left twin,” that is a child who has outlived its fellow twin, is thought to have the power of curing the thrush by blowing three times successively into the patient’s mouth, provided this same patient be of opposite sex to the operator.
There is a strong tendency in the “North Countrie” to connect the past and the present, external nature and the history and destiny of man. Thus the aurora borealis is still well known there as “the Derwentwater Lights,” in consequence of having been particularly red and vivid at the time of that unfortunate nobleman’s execution. The death of Louis XVI. was fore-
- ↑ Book iv. Canto 2.
