"B. 'Ah, mercy! the dead-bell went through my head just now with such a knell as I never heard.'
"I. 'I heard it too.'
"B. 'Did you indeed? That is remarkable. I never knew of two hearing it at the same time before.'
"I. 'We will not go to Midgehope to-night.'
"B. 'I would not go for all the world! I shall warrant it is my poor brother Wat. Who knows what these wild Irish may have done to him?'"
The itching of the nose, like that of the ears, is not without its signification, denoting that a stranger will certainly appear before many hours have passed by, in allusion to which Dekker, in his "Honest Whore," says:—"We shall ha' guests to-day; my nose itcheth so." In the north of England, however, if the nose itches it is reckoned a sign that the person will either be crossed, vexed, or kissed by a fool; whereas an old writer tells us that "when a man's nose itcheth it is a signe he shall drink wine." Many omens, too, are gathered from bleeding of the nose. Thus Grose says, "One drop of blood from the nose commonly foretells death or a very severe fit of sickness; three drops are still more ominous;" and according to another notion one drop from the left nostril is a sign of good luck, and vice versâ. Bleeding of the nose seems also to have been regarded as a sign of love, if we may judge from a passage in Boulster's "Lectures," published early in the seventeenth century:—"'Did my nose ever bleed when I was in your company?' and, poor wretch, just as she spake this, to show her true heart, her nose fell a-bleeding." Again, that bleeding of the nose was looked upon as ominous in days gone by, we may gather from Launcelot's exclamation in the Merchant of Venice (Act ii., sc. 5), "It was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last at six o'clock"—a superstition to which many of our old writers refer. Among further superstitions connected with the nose we may mention one in Cornwall, known as "the blue vein," an illustration of which occurs in Mr. Hunt's "Popular Romances of the West of England," who relates the following little anecdote:—"A fond mother was paying more than ordinary attention to a fine healthy-looking child, a boy about three years old. The poor woman's breast was heaving with emotion, and she struggled to repress her sighs. Upon inquiring if anything was really wrong, she said, 'The old lady of the house had just told her that the child could not live long because he had a blue vein across his nose.'" This piece of folk-lore, which caused the anxious mother such distress, is not confined to the West of England, but crops up here and there throughout the country. While speaking of the nose, we may just note that it is the subject of various proverbs. Thus "to put the nose out of joint" means to supplant one in another's favour, and the popular one of "paying through the nose," implying extortion, may, it has been suggested, have originated in a poll-tax levied by Odin, which was called in Sweden a nose-tax, and was a penny per nose or poll. Once more, we have the term "nose of wax" applied to a person who is very accommodating, and one may occasionally hear the phrase "wipe the nose" used in the sense of affront.
Leaving the nose, however, we find similar odd fancies attached to the eye. In many places we are told that "it's a good thing to have meeting eyebrows, as such a person will never know trouble," although, curious to say, on the Continent quite a different significance is attributed to this peculiarity. In Greece, for instance, it is held as an omen that the man is a vampire, and in Denmark and Germany it is said to indicate that he is a werewolf. In China, also, there is a proverb that "people whose eyebrows meet can never expect to attain to the dignity of a minister of state." There can be no doubt that, according to the general idea, meeting eyebrows are not considered lucky:—
"Trust not the man whose eyebrows meet,
For in his heart you'll find deceit."
Thus, Charles Kingsley, in "Two Years Ago," speaks of this idea in the following passage:—"Tom began carefully scrutinising Mrs. Harvey's face. It had been very handsome. It was still very clever, but the eyebrows clashed together downwards above her nose, and rising higher at the outward corners, indicated, as surely as the restless down-drop eye, a character self-conscious, furtive, capable of great inconsistencies, possibly of great deceit."