Another article of dress that has its superstitions is the apron, which some women turn before the new moon, to insure good luck for the ensuing month. In Yorkshire, when a married woman's apron falls off, it is a sign that something is coming to vex her; when, however, the apron of an unmarried girl drops down, she is frequently the object of laughter, as there is considered no surer sign than that she is thinking about her sweetheart. Again, if a young woman's petticoats are longer than her dress, this is a proof that her mother does not love her so much as her father, a notion which extends as far as Scotland. This piece of folk-lore may have originated in the mother not attending so much to the child's dress as was her duty, whereas, however much the father may love his child, he may at the same time be perfectly ignorant of the rights and wrongs of female attire: an excuse which does not hold good in the case of the mother. Some of the descriptions of plants in use among the rural peasantry refer to the petticoat. Thus, the poppy is said to have a red petticoat and a green gown; the daffodil, a yellow petticoat and green gown, and so on; these fancies being the subject of many of our old nursery rhymes, as, for instance:—
"Daffadown-dilly is come up to town,
In a yellow petticoat and a green gown."
Passing on in the next place to stockings, it is lucky, as with other articles of dress, to put one wrong-side out, but unlucky to turn it on discovering one's mistake. Some, too, consider it a matter of importance as to which foot they put the stocking on first when dressing themselves in the morning—the luck of the day being supposed in a great measure to depend on this circumstance—as to clothe the left foot before the right one is a sign of misfortune. "Flinging the stocking" was an old marriage custom, being really a kind of divination, which Misson, in his "Travels through England," thus describes:—"The young men, it seems, took the bride's stockings, and the girls those of the bridegroom, each of whom, sitting at the foot of the bed, threw the stocking over their heads, endeavouring to make it fall upon that of the bride or her spouse; if the bridegroom's stocking, thrown by the girls, fell upon the bridegroom's head, it was a sign that they themselves would soon be married; and similar luck was derived from the falling of the bride's stockings, thrown by the young men."
There is a superstitious notion in some places that when the bride retires to rest on her wedding-night, her bridesmaids should lay her stockings across, as this act is supposed to guarantee her future prosperity in the marriage state. Another use to which the stocking has been put is its being hung up to receive presents at Christmas-time, a custom which, as Mr. Henderson points out, the Pilgrim Fathers carried to America, and bequeathed to their descendants.
It is curious to find even the garter an object of superstition, being employed by young women in their love divinations on Midsummer Eve, a period, it must be remembered, considered most propitious for such ceremonies. Their mode of procedure is this:—The maiden anxious to have a peep of her future husband must sleep in a county different from that in which she usually resides, and on going to bed must take care to knit the left garter about the right stocking, repeating the following incantation, and at every pause knitting a knot:—
"This knot I knit
To know the thing I know not yet;
That I may see
The man that shall my husband be;
How he goes, and what he wears,
And what he does all days and years."
On retiring to rest the wished-for one will appear in her dreams, wearing the insignia of his trade or profession.
Again, as a popular object of superstition the shoe is unrivalled, and antiquaries are still undecided as to why our forefathers invested this matter-of-fact article of dress with such mysterious qualities, selecting it as the symbol of good fortune, one of the well-known uses in which it has been employed being the throwing of it for luck, constant allusions to which practice occur in our old writers. Thus, Beaumont and Fletcher, in The Honest Man's Fortune, refer to it:—
"Captain, your shoes are old; pray put 'em off,
And let one fling 'em after us."
And Ben Jonson, in his Masque of the Gipsies, represents one of the gipsies as saying:—