The common houseleek, here called donnerkraut (thunder-herb), will protect from lightning the roof on which it grows.
Animals beaten with a switch of privet or dog-wood will die or fall sick.
Larkspur hung over the stable door will keep witches from entering.
The Atropa belladonna (called here buchert) renders mad whoever tastes of it, and in his madness he will be compelled blindly to obey the will of whoever has given him of this herb to eat; therefore it is here said of a man who behaves insanely that “he must have eaten buchert.”
Whoever kills an adder under a white-hazel bush, plants a pea in the head of this adder, and then buries it in the earth so that the pea can strike root, has only to gather the first flower which grows from the pea and wear it in his cap in order henceforward to have power over all witches in the neighborhood. But let him beware of the witches, who, knowing this, are ever on the lookout to catch him without the pea-flower and to do him an injury.
A particular growth of vine-leaf, whose exact definition I have not succeeded in rightly ascertaining, is eagerly sought for by Saxon girls in some villages. Whoever finds it sticks it in her hair, and thus decorated she has the right to kiss the first man she meets on her homeward way. This will insure her speedy marriage. A story is related of a girl who, meeting a nobleman driving in a handsome four-in-hand carriage, stopped the horses, and begged leave to kiss him, to the gentleman’s no small astonishment. He resigned himself, however, with a good grace when he had grasped the situation, and gave the kiss as well as a golden piece to the fair suppliant. The proper romantic dénouement of this episode would have been for the gentleman to lead home as bride the maiden thus cast in his path by fate, but we are not told that he pushed his complacence quite so far.
A whole volume might be written on the subject of agrarian superstition, of which let a few examples here suffice.
In many villages it is customary for the ploughman, going to work for the first time that year in the field, to drive his plough over a broomstick laid on the threshold of the court-yard.
The first person who sows each year will have meagre crops. During the whole sowing-time no one should give a kindling out of the house. It is never allowable to sow in Holy Week.
To insure the wheat against being eaten by birds, the sowing should be done in silence before sunrise, and without looking over the shoulder. Also earth taken from the church-yard will keep birds off the field.