derable alarm existed, and Good Friday was
looked forward to with no little amount of anxiety in that part of
Somerset.

Good Friday came and passed without any untoward event. Yet that is
not enough to dispel the faith in Mother Shipton's prediction. She is
not at fault. Some blundering calculator made a mistake as to time,
and the people of Somerset are yet to have their great catastrophe.

A curious superstitious custom is observed in the Isle of Man. Mothers
believe their children may be preserved from disease by placing them
in the hopper of a water flour-mill while the wheel makes three
revolutions. On a Sunday not long since a number of children were
taken to the Grenaby mill, in the parish of Malew, three miles from
Castletown, in order to be subjected to the "charm" we have mentioned.
Two hoppers of the mill were crammed full of children, and, as soon as
they were settled, the miller caused the wheel to revolve three times,
the parents of the children being present at the time. In order to be
efficacious, the ceremony must be gone through at a time when the
ministers of the district are preaching in their pulpits. For this
reason, about noon on Sundays is generally the time chosen for the
performance of this curious rite.

At an inquest lately held in London on the body of a woman aged
eighty-two years, the evidence showed that the woman's death resulted
from injury to the head, caused by a fall from her chair. One of the
witnesses told the coroner that he believed the time had come for the
woman to die. His reason for that opinion was, that she had dreamed, a
fortnight before her death, that she had a fall, and cut open her
head, and was likely to die in consequence.

An awful fulfilment of a dream took place at a calico-printing
establishment at Sunnyside. A clerk in the work remarked to one of the
machine printers that he was glad to see him at his employment; the
printer asked his reason for his congratulations, when the clerk
observed that during the previous night he (the clerk) had dreamed
that he (the printer) had, while at his work, dropped down dead. The
printer replied, in a jocular way, "You see you were mistaken, for I
am alive yet." The printer being in his usual health and spirits, no
further notice was taken of the matter; but singularly, at three
o'clock in the afternoon of the same day, while attending to his
duties at his machine, he dropped down dead without the least warning.

This ye