J. B. C.
EAST NORFOLK FOLK LORE.
1. Cure for Fits.—A similar superstition on this subject to the one mentioned by D. (Vol. i, p. 11.) is prevalent in this vicinity. Nine or eleven young men or maidens (an odd number is indispensable) contribute each a silver coin for the manufacture of the ring. A friend of the sufferer gives out that he is making a collection for the purpose, and calls on the parties expected to contribute, and the coins must be given unasked, to ensure its efficacy. A watchmaker in my parish tells me that he has made ten or a dozen such rings within as many years, and that he has full faith in their curative properties.
2. Cure for Ague.—Being afflicted two years since with a severe tertian ague, I was solicited, after the usual medical treatment had failed, by a lady to take as much of the snuff of a candle as would lie on a sixpence, made into an electuary with honey. I complied and, strange to say, a complete cure was effected. Whether the nausea consequent on such an unpleasant remedy had any effect on the spasmodic nature of the malady, I cannot say; but the fact is certain, and it is esteemed a sovereign specific by the Norfolk rustics.
E. S. TAYLOR.
Martham, Norfolk.
Extreme Ignorance and Superstition.
—In a large village in Dorsetshire, not far from the county town, an intelligent man went recently into the house of a somewhat respectable woman who keeps a general shop in the village, and who is the mother of a numerous family and seeing her with a large family Bible open before her, and several of her children collected around, while she was cutting and paring their finger nails, and so holding their hands as that their cuttings might drop on the leaves of the Bible, he asked her why she did this. Suspecting, by her manner, that she had some object in view, judge of his surprise, when she replied—"I always, when I cut the nails of my children, let the cuttings fall on the open Bible, that they may grow up to be honest. They will never steal, if the nails are cut over the Bible!!" Do we not yet require the educator to be abroad?
T. WE.