The lasses o’ lovers will have no lack.
And an old woman in the north, adds Mr. Henderson,[14] said lately in accordance with this belief to a lady, “It’s na wonder Jock ——’s lasses marry off so fast, ye ken what a braw black cat they’ve got.” It is still more lucky if such a cat comes of its own accord, and takes up its residence in any house. The same gentleman gives an excellent receipt to bring lovers to the house, which was communicated to him by Canon Raine, and was gathered from the conversation of two maid-servants. One of them, it seems, peeped out of curiosity into the box of her fellow servant, and was astonished to find there the end of a tallow candle stuck through and through with pins. “What’s that, Molly,” said Bessie, “that I seed i’ thy box?” “Oh,” said Molly, “it’s to bring my sweetheart. Thou seest, sometimes he’s slow a coming, and if I stick a candle case full o’ pins it always fetches him.” A member of the family certified that John was thus duly fetched from his abode, a distance of six miles, and pretty often too.
Some of the most famous divinations about marriage are practised with hazel-nuts on Allhallowe’en. In Indo-European tradition the hazel was sacred to love; and when Loki in the form of a falcon rescued Idhunn, the goddess of youthful life, from the power of the frost-giants, he carried her off in his beak in the shape of a hazel-nut.[15] So in Denmark, as in ancient Rome, nuts are scattered at a marriage. In northern divinations on Allhallowe’en nuts are placed on the bars of a grate by pairs, which have first been named after a pair of lovers, and according to the result, their combustion, explosion, and the like, the wise divine the fortune of the lovers. Graydon has beautifully versified this superstition:—
These glowing nuts are emblems true
Of what in human life we view;
The ill-matched couple fret and fume,
And thus in strife themselves consume;
Or from each other wildly start,
And with a noise for ever part.
But see the happy, happy pair,