elling fortunes, and seen people trembling at their curses,
and witnessed others highly elated at their blessings and favourable
predictions. In far-back times the leaders of the gipsies were chosen
as their chiefs in consequence of this acknowledged power of
divination and enchantment; they were therefore regarded not as kings
or princes, but as prophets or magicians.

At Yetholm the gipsies have an idea that it is unlucky to have
unbaptized children in their houses. Women of that village sell
dreaming powders, by sleeping on which for a certain number of nights
the sleepers are privileged to see their future partners in life.

As an instance in the belief of unholy prayers, we give an episode in
the Leith police court in 1878. A woman named Allan was charged with
assaulting a man because he had ill-used one of her boys. She was a
person of wild passions, and upbraided the man with divers acts of
cruelty to her children. Bursting out into loud cursing, she reminded
the man that, eight years previously, she had, in consequence of him
kicking her orphan child, prayed that neither he nor his wife should
have children; "and you know," she exclaimed, "my prayers have been
answered!" The woman professed to believe her unholy prayers had
hindered the subjects of her wrath from having offspring. The man
quailed under the termagant's piercing eye, and trembled at the
renewed curses.

At the same court, a few years ago, it transpired that two women in
the fishing village of Newhaven had a quarrel, during which one of
them cursed the other and "salted her," _i.e._ threw salt at her. To
cast salt with an evil intent after one, is as unlucky, in the
estimation of fishermen and their wives, as it is to tell a
fisherwoman that a hare's foot is in her creel, or to mention
"Brounger" or the name of a four-footed beast at sea.

A few sceptical friends, not believing all they had heard regarding
the superstitious notions of fishermen, were advised to put a young
pig among some fishermen's lines on board of a boat at Newhaven pier.
The trick being performed, and discovered before the boat put to sea,
both pig and lines were tossed overboard, to the spoiling of a whole
day's fishing.

A boat's crew recently left Newhaven pier for the oyster dredging in
the Firth of Forth. One of the crew, a young lad, who had been at a
circus in Edinburgh the previous evening, happened, while giving an
account of what he had seen, to say "horse." No