A prohatiim
est Recipe
for Catarrh and Colds—Egg-shell Superstition—Curious old Gaelic Poem.
How intense was the recent frost [January 1875], and how
hyperborean all our surroundings, may be judged of from the fact that on
coming out of church yesterday, one of our people, a greyheaded, pious
old man, spoke of the happy change to open weather and " westlan'
breezes" very solemnly as "the blessed thaw"—an
t'aiteamh beannaichte. Before
any one else north or south of the Tweed made any reference to the
coming winter, our readers may remember that we did, and that we
inculcated on every one the wisdom of keeping themselves warm and
comfortable, by means of good fires and otherwise, as the best way of
being jolly in the best and truest sense of that much misapprehended and
frequently misapplied term. It was, in truth, a trying season; but
sensibly and thickly clad in many a fold of honest home-spun curain, or
plaiding, our people for the most part got over it without any very
serious ailments. Influenzas, catarrhs, and colds in every form were of
course common, and, for a time, one was met on every side by an
uncomfortable and sometimes disagreeable amount of coughing,
expectoration, sniftering, sneezing, and nose-blowing; but now all this
has almost or altogether passed away, and people are again going about
as usual, clad no otherwise than ordinarily, and as becometh the
inhabitants of a temperate zone: plaids, comforters, double-ply mittens,
and "bosom-friends," having been laid aside as unnecessary incumbrances
in weather that is now actually warm and spring-like, as compared with
that dreadful month or six weeks of Baffin's Bay-like temperature, that,
when it got fairly at you, and off your guard, seemed capable of making
the very hlood freeze in one's veins, even as it froze the water in our
subterranean and best guarded lead pipes. Nothing, perhaps, could more
pointedly illustrate the healthy vigour and vitality of our people
generally than the fact that, although we have amongst us many who have
arrived at extreme old age, and some who have been more or less
valetudinarian for years, there has not been a single death in the
district—a district which, as we look around us, contains some two or
three thousand inhabitants—since the beginning of last December; a fact
which, considering the inclemency of the weather, and the high
death-rate everywhere else, is something surely worthy chronicling. "We
are probably correct in believing that the worst at least of winter is
already past, but much cold and stormy weather may be still in store for
us, and as colds and coughs may return, we beg to make friendly offer of
the following prolatum
est recipe,
quite a popular cure in this part of the country for every form of
winter influenza. Cure or no cure, the recipe has at all events the
merit of being extremely simple, and to thousands of our readers very
readily available at any time. Take a pint—say a tumblerful—of sea water
that has been heated to the boiling-point, without having been allowed
actually to boil. Sprinkle over it some pepper, rather more plentifully
than you do in your soup ; drink this as hot as you can bear it as you
step into bed at night. Next day your cold and cough will have
disappeared like an unpleasant dream. You may be weak, but you will,
upon the whole, be well! We cannot personally vouch for the efficacy of
this draught, but we find that many people here invariably resort to it
as a ready and popular cure for their colds, and they speak highly of
its virtues, and, contrary to what one would expect, of its comparative
pleasantness and palatability as well. A sensible old man whom we
questioned on the subject a few days ago, and a firm believer in the
efficacy of this " saline" draught, told us in confidence that the rationale of
the thing consisted in the fact that it immediately acted as a powerful
sudorific; and that to this, he thought, was to be attributed the
thoroughness as well as the rapidity of the cure. Probably he was right.
It is a simple, cheap, and readily available remedy at all events, and
dwellers by the sea-side might do worse than give it a trial at a pinch,
when more orthodox remedies have failed, or are not ready to hand. One
grand thing about it is the certainty that, if it does no good, it
cannot possibly do harm. Another old man in our neighbourhood, still
hale and active, though in his eighty-fourth year, told us lately that
he never took a dose, not a ha'penny's worth, of medicine, druggist's or
doctor's stuff in his life. "Whenever I felt out of sorts," he
continued, "I just went down to the sea and drank a good large draught
of salt water; that was
always my medicine,
and it never once failed to do me good." So that there may bo more
virtue in sea water as a curative agent in bronchial and stomachic
ailments than the world generally wots. And if so, how consoling the
thought that this druggist's
shop is never shut; the supply is exhaustless, and no charge!
A curious bit of popular superstition is the following,
which a gentleman in a neighbouring district was good enough to bring
recently under our notice. After breakfast, at which, among other good
things, we had some excellent fresh eggs, he suggested that we should go
into the kitchen to smoke, "and watch," he said, "what my housekeeper
will do with the empty egg-shells as the breakfast things are brought up
from the parlour." We went and stood and watched accordingly, and this
is what we saw, chatting with our host the while, that the housekeeper
might not suspect that we took any particular interest in her doings. We
noticed that when the girl came into the kitchen and laid the tray upon
the table, the housekeeper, a staid and respectable-looking woman, well
advanced in years, walked over and took the egg-shells—there were four
or five of them—and, placing them one after another into an egg-cup, she
took a small knife, and passed it with a smart tap through the bottoms
or hitherto unbroken ends of the lot, and then turned away to some other
employment. This was all, for our host immediately suggested that we
should visit the stables. We were a good deal puzzled, having seen so
little, where we. expected to have seen a great* deal, and that little
so seemingly without meaning and purposeless. When we got to the
stables, our host asked if we understood the meaning of the old lady's
manner of dealing with the egg-shells. We confessed our profound
ignorance, having never seen—never, at least, seen so as seriously to
notice—anything of this kind before. "My housekeeper, you must know,"
continued our friend, "is a most excellent woman, but much given to
little superstitious observances and harmless giosragan. She
will not allow a single egg-shell to go out of her sight without first
making a hole through it, knocking out its bottom in short, in case, as
she has more than once seriously told me, a witch should get hold of it
and use it as a boat, in which to set to sea in order to raise violent
storms, in which the ablest seamanship could not possibly save hundreds
of vessels from being miserably wrecked!" "You may smile," he went on, "
for it is supremely absurd, to be sure, that an otherwise sensible woman
should give credence to such nonsense; but, after all, if you make
inquiry, you will find that the superstition in question is quite a
common one. Few middle-aged women, brought up in the Highlands, but will
act as you saw my housekeeper act with the empty eg^-shells, knocking a
hole through their unbroken ends before throwing them aside, or
frequently even more effectually providing against the possibility of
their being used as witched life-boats, by crushing the whole shell into
a crumpled mass bodily in the hand." "We haven't as yet had many
opportunities of making inquiry into 'the matter, but from all we can
gather from some old women in our neighbourhood, we believe empty
egg-shells are, or perhaps we should say were, frequently treated after
the fashion stated, and for the reason assigned. Some of our readers in
the north-west Highlands and Hebrides may perhaps know something more
about a very odd and curious superstition to be met with in the latter
half of the nineteenth century. For obvious reasons, it is a
superstition more likely to be prevalent among islanders and dwellers by
the sea-shore than in the more inland parts of the country.
The following fragment of a curious old poem we picked up
about ten days ago from the recitation of Alexander Maclachlan,
shepherd, Dalness. It is unfortunately but a fragment, as we have said,
but we give it here in the hope that some of our friends of the Gaelic
Society, or of our many readers throughout the Hebrides, may be able to
supply more or less of the remainder. Maclachlan heard the entire poem
from a Glenetive forester, a very old man, some years ago, but this man
is now unfortunately dead, and the reciter could not direct us to any
one likely to be able to repeat the poem at length. Perhaps our friend
Mr. J. F. Campbell of Islay, so indefatigable and marvellously
successful in his search after Celtic song and story, "all of the olden
time," may have met with it in a more or less complete form; if so, he
would very much oblige us all in the north by giving us a version of it
and its history, as far as he knows it. WTo may state that it
does not appear in Leabhar-na-Feinne, which
we have searched for it, though unquestionably a production of
considerable antiquity. Maclachlan told us that the old forester, in
reciting it, called it Conaltradh
nan Ian, or The
Parliament of Birds. The
following were evidently the opening lines of the poem, and likeliest to
be remembered by one who only heard it repeated once or twice :—
This curious poem seems to have been throughout of a
dramatic form. Maclachlan says that, as he heard it repeated, almost all
our better known wild-birds were introduced, and had appropriate
speeches and parts assigned to them. He particularly referred to a very
funny Speech by the wren, who finally quarrels with the wagtail, by whom
he had been insulted, and gives him a good licking. The end of it all is
that the eagle is unanimously elected king of birds, with the glas-eun
or falcon-kite as his lieutenant. The throstle cock is elected bard of
birds, and the dipper admiral and commander-in-chief of the wild-bird
fleet. Any one recovering the whole poem would be conferring no small
boon on Gaelic literature.
