must bite them off, if need be; and in the West of Northumberland it is believed that if the first parings are buried under an ash tree the child will turn out a “top singer.” The mention of the ash is curious, for has it not been from very ancient times a sacred tree, supplying in its sap the first nourishment, to the Grecian hero, as now to the Celtic Highlander? Nay, according to Hesiod, Zeus made a third or brazen race of hard ash-wood—pugnacious and terrible;[1] as Yggdrasil, the cloud-tree of the Norseman, out of which he believed the first man was made, was an ash. Spenser speaks of this tree as being “for nothing ill,” yet it has always been regarded as a special attractor of lightning, and mothers teach their children thus:—
Beware of an oak,
It draws the stroke.
Avoid an ash,
It courts the flash.
Creep under the thorn,
It will save you from harm.
The Norman peasant shows his confidence in the virtue of the thorn by constantly wearing a sprig of it in his cap, alleging as his reason that the Saviour’s crown was woven of it. The maple, though “seldom inward sound itself,” is thought in some parts of England to confer longevity on children if they are passed through its branches. In West Grinstead Park, Sussex, was an old maple much used for this purpose, and when a few years ago a rumour spread through the parish that it was about to be cut down, many petitions were made that it might be spared.
But to return. When the year of infancy is past, and baby’s nails may safely be given up to the scissors, care must be taken not to cut them on a Sunday or Friday. Friday, of course, is an unlucky day, and as for Sunday the old rhyme says:—
Better a child had ne’er been born
Than cut his nails on a Sunday morn!
Another variation of the verse runs thus—
Friday hair, Sunday horn,
Better that child had ne’er been born!
- ↑ Grote’s History of Greece, vol. i. chap. 2.
