Many months had not passed away when the discharged dairy-maid was observed to suffer from illness, which, however, she constantly spoke of as nothing; but knowing dames saw too clearly the truth. One morning there was found in a field a newly-born babe strangled. The unfortunate girl was at once suspected as being the parent, and the evidence was soon sufficient to charge her with the murder. She was tried, and, chiefly by the evidence of the young farmer and his family, convicted of, and executed for, the murder.
Everything now went wrong in the farm, and the young man suddenly left it and went into another part of the country.
Still nothing prospered, and gradually he took to drink to drown some secret sorrow. He was more frequently on the road by night than by day; and, go where he would, a white hare was constantly crossing his path. The white hare was often seen by others, almost always under the feet of his horse; and the poor terrified animal would go like the wind to avoid the strange apparition.
One morning the young farmer was found drowned in a forsaken mine; and the horse, which had evidently suffered extreme terror, was grazing near the corpse. Beyond all doubt the white hare, which is known to hunt the perjured and the false-hearted to death, had terrified the horse to such a degree, that eventually the rider was thrown into the mine-waste in which the body was found.
THE HAND OF A SUICIDE.
Placing the hand of a man who has died by his own act is a cure for many diseases.
The following is given me by a thinking man, living in one of the towns in the west of Cornwall:—
“There is a young man in this town who had been afflicted with running tumours from his birth. When about seventeen years of age he had the hand of a man who had hanged himself passed over the wounds on his back, and, strange to say, he recovered from that time, and is now comparatively robust and hearty. This incident is true; I was present when the charm was performed. It should be observed that the notion appears to be that the ‘touch’ is only effectual on the opposite sex; but in this case they were both, the suicide and the afflicted one, of the same sex.”
This is only a modified form of the superstition that a wen, or any strumous swelling, can be cured by touching it with the dead hand of a man who has just been publicly hanged.
I once saw a young woman led on to the scaffold, in the Old Bailey, for the purpose of having a wen touched with the hand of a man who had just been executed.