ask one's
servants to steal potatoes. It is easy in the country, where you can
pick one out of anybody's field.' 'And what did you do?' I asked. 'Oh,
I drove to Covent Garden and ordered a lot of fruit and flowers. While
the man was not looking, I stole a potato--a very little one. I don't
think there was any harm in it.' 'And did Mr. Johnson try the potato
cure?' 'Yes, he carried it in his pocket, and now he is quite well. I
told the doctor, and he says he knows of the cure, but he dares not
recommend it.'

How oddly superstitions survive! The central idea of this modern folly
about the potato is that you must pilfer the root. Let us work the idea
of the healing or magical herb backwards, from Kensington to European
folklore, and thence to classical times, to Homer, and to the Hottentots.
Turning first to Germany, we note the beliefs, not about the potato, but
about another vegetable, the mandrake. Of all roots, in German
superstition, the Alraun, or mandrake, is the most famous. The herb was
conceived of, in the savage fashion, as a living human person, a kind of
old witch-wife. {144}

Again, the root has a human shape. 'If a hereditary thief who has
preserved his chastity gets hung,' the broad-leafed, yellow-flowered
mandrake grows up, in his likeness, beneath the gallows from which he is
suspended. The mandrake, like the moly, the magical herb of the Odyssey,
is 'hard for men to dig.' He who desires to possess a mandrake must stop
his ears with wax, so that he may not hear the deathly yells which the
plant utters as it is being dragged out of the earth. Then before
sunrise, on a Friday, the amateur goes out with a dog, 'all black,' makes
three crosses round the mandrake, loosens the soil about the root, ties
the root to the dog's tail, and offers the beast a piece of bread. The
dog runs at the bread, drags out the mandrake root, and falls dead,
killed by the horrible yell of the plant. The root is now taken up,
washed with wine, wrapped in silk, laid in a casket, bathed every Friday,
'and clothed in a little new white smock every new moon.' The mandrake
acts, if thus considerately treated, as a kind of familiar spirit. 'Every
piece of coin put to her over night is found doubled in the morning.'
Gipsy folklore, and the folklore of American children, keep this belief
in doubling deposits. The gipsies use the notion in what they call 'The
Great Trick.' Some foolish rustic makes up his money in a