Warwick.
Northamptonshire Folk Lore.—There is a singular custom prevailing in some parts of Northamptonshire, and perhaps some of your correspondents may be able to mention other places where a similar practice exists. If a female is afflicted with fits, nine pieces of silver money and nine threehalfpences are collected from nine bachelors: the silver money is converted into a ring to be worn by the afflicted person, and the threehalfpences (i. e. 13½d.) are paid to the maker of the ring, an inadequate remuneration for his labour, but which he good-naturedly accepts. If the afflicted person be a male, the contributions are levied upon females.
E. H.
Slow-worm Superstition (Vol. viii., p. 33.).—As a child I was always told by the servants that if any serpent was "scotched, not killed," it would revive if it could reach its hole before sunset, but that otherwise it must die. Hence the custom, so universal, of hanging any serpent on a tree after killing it.
Seleucus.
A Devonshire Charm for the Thrush.—On visiting one of my parishioners, whose infant was ill with the thrush, I asked her what medicine she had given the child? She replied, she had done nothing to it but say the eighth Psalm over it. I found that her cure was to repeat the eighth Psalm over the infant three times, three days running; and on my hesitating a doubt as to the efficacy of the remedy, she appealed to the case of another of her children who had suffered badly from the thrush, but had been cured by the use of no other means. If it was said "with the virtue," it was, she declared, an unfailing cure. The mention, in this Psalm, of "the mouths of babes and sucklings," I suppose led to its selection.
W. Fraser.
Tor-Mohun.