middle class, and many of them had received a good education. The same belief, I find, prevails throughout Yorkshire.[1]
It is with reluctance that I approach the next anecdote, for, in truth, I can never recall it without pain; it tells the sad effects of local treatment of rheumatism. About twenty years have passed, since, after a long day’s angling in the College (a small river which winds round the northern side of the Cheviot), I entered the thatched cottage of a shepherd, which stood near the confluence of that stream with the Bowmont. The man and his wife bade me welcome, after the kindly hospitable fashion of that district. I grew interested in their conversation, and promised to visit them again when I came next into their neighbourhood. I did so during the following spring, but what was my grief at finding the man, who had seemed to me a model of strength, now a complete wreck; he was lying on a long settle by the fire side, wrapped in blankets. The poor woman, on seeing me, burst into tears, and it was some time before her suffering husband could tell me his tale of too-confiding simplicity.
In the latter part of the preceding autumn, he had caught cold while tending his flock on the mountain side; acute rheumatism had followed; he suffered a good deal, and, being of a sanguine temperament, chafed at the slow but safe steps adopted by the surgeon of the district. As week after week passed by with little amendment, constant pain and impending poverty induced him at last, in an evil hour, to give heed to his neighbours’ advice, and resort to “the wise man who lived far over the hills.” The wise man declared that the case was desperate, and demanded desperate remedies. As the first step, he directed
- ↑ Compare this with the Devonshire belief that if anyone is bitten by a viper the viper is to be killed, and the fat applied to the wound as an infallible remedy. I remember a cow being bitten by a viper and cured in this manner. And, again, with the Sussex remedy for hydrophobia: “A slice of the liver of the dog that bit you, boiled and eaten.” Again, a relation of the late vicar of Heversham, Westmoreland, informs me that on one occasion, when a beggar had been bitten by a dog at the vicarage, the man came back to the house to ask for some of the animal’s hair to put to the wound.—S. B. G.
