Luckie has cheated us o’ our bairnie!” Soon afterwards the woman heard something fall down the lum (or chimney), and looking out she saw a waxen image of her baby, stuck full of pins, lying on the hearth. When her husband came home he made up a large fire and threw the fairy lump upon it; but, instead of burning, the thing flew up the chimney, and the house instantly resounded with shouts of joy and peals of laughter. Family affection must have been very strong when any trifle closely connected with the father was deemed a safeguard for the child,[1] a safeguard needed till its baptism shielded it from every evil or malicious sprite.
Our northern Folk-Lore is unanimous in bearing witness to the power of baptism. A clerical friend of mine, who once held a cure in Northumberland, tells me that it is there considered to affect a child physically as well as spiritually a notion which I think prevails more or less through the whole country. I have heard old people in many places say of sickly infants, “Ah, there will be a change when he has been taken to church! Children never thrive till they have been christened.” Another informs me that about five years ago an instance came under his notice of the healing power supposed to be wrought by baptism as regards the body. The infant child of a chimney-sweeper at Thorne, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was in a very weak state of health, and appeared to be pining away. A neighbour looked in, and inquired if the child had been baptized. On an answer being given in the negative she gravely said, “I would try having it christened.” The counsel was taken, and I believe with success. It is the custom in Northumberland to make the chrisom-child sleep the first night in the cap he wore at baptism. “Loud murmurs,” says my friend, “arose against me early in my ministerial life for applying so much water that the cap had to be taken off and dried, whereas it should be left on till the next morning. I threw the blame on the modern caps, with their expanse of frilling, on which the good woman said that I was quite right; she had an
- ↑ A part of the father’s clothes should be laid over a female child, and the mother’s petticoat on a male child, to find favour with the opposite sex.—Thorpe’s Mythology, vol. ii. p. 109.
