If an invalid goes out for the first time and makes a circuit, this circuit must be with the sun; if against the sun, there will be a relapse.
ADDERS, AND THE MILPREVE.
The country people around the Land’s-End say that in old times no one could live in the low grounds, which were then covered with thickets, and these swarming with adders. Even at a much later period, in the summer-time, it was not safe to venture amongst the furze on the Downs without a milpreve. (I have never seen a milpreve; but it is described to me as being about the size of a pigeon’s egg, and I am told that it is made by the adders when they get together in great numbers. Is it not probable that the milpreve may be one of the madrepore corals—millepore—found sometimes on the beaches around Land’s-End?)
A friend writes me:—“I was once shewn a milpreve; it was nothing more than a beautiful ball of coralline limestone, the section of the coral being thought to be entangled young snakes.”
When some old men were streaming the “Bottoms” up near Partimey, they were often obliged to leave work on account of the number of adders that would get together as if by agreement, and advance upon them.
One day one of the tin streamers chanced to leave his pot of milk, uncovered, out of the moor-house, when an adder got into it. The man cut a turf and put over the pot to prevent the reptile from escaping. In a few minutes the tinners saw “the ugly things crawling and leaping from all quarters towards the pot.” The streamers were obliged to run, and take which way they would; the adders seemed to be coming from every direction, further and further off.
At last “they formed a heap round the pot as large as a pook [cock] of hay.” Towards night all the reptiles were quite still, then the men gathered together, around the mass of adders, a great quantity of furze, (being summer, there was plenty cut and dry close at hand,) and piled it up like sheaves to make a mow, laying a circle of well-dried turf without it. They then fired the turf on every side, and when it was well ignited, they fired the furze. “Oh, it was a sight to see the adders when they felt the smoke and the flame! they began to boil, as it were, all in a heap, and fell back into the flaming furze; those which leaped through perishing on the brilliant ring of burning peat. Thus were killed thousands upon thousands of adders, and the moors were clear for a long, long period.”
This is related nearly as the story was told; but it appears necessary to make some allowance for that spirit of exaggeration which is a characteristic of all Celtic people, ere they have been tutored to know the dignity of truth.
“The country people retaine a conceite, that the snakes, by their breathing upon a hazel-wand, doe make a stone ring of blew colour, in which there appeareth the yellow figure of a snake, and that beasts which are stung, being given to drink of the water wherein this stone hath bene socked, will there-through recover.”[62]
This was clearly one of the so-called “Druidic rings,”—examples of which may be seen in our museums,—which have been found in England and in Ireland. It is curious that at the glassworks of Murano, near Venice, they still make rings, or beads, precisely resembling the ancient ones, and these are used largely as money in Africa.