dshire, "in
the old climbing-boy days, chimneys used to be swept on New Year's
morning, that one of the right sex should be the first to enter; and the
young urchins of the neighbourhood went the round of the houses before
daylight singing songs, when one of their number would be admitted into
the kitchen 'for good luck all the year.'" In 1875 this custom was still
practised; and at some of the farmhouses, if washing-day chanced to fall
on the first day of the year, it was either put off, or to make sure,
before the women could come, the waggoner's lad was called up early that
he might be let out and let in again.{11}

The idea of the unluckiness of a woman's being the "first-foot" is
extraordinarily widespread; the present writer has met with it in an
ordinary London restaurant, where great stress was laid upon a man's
opening the place on New Year's morning before the waitresses arrived. A
similar belief is found even in far-away China: it is there unlucky on
New Year's Day to meet a woman on first going out.{12} Can the belief be
connected with such ideas about dangerous influences proceeding from
women as have been described by Dr. Frazer in Vol. III. of "The Golden
Bough,"{13} or does it rest merely on a view of woman as the inferior
sex? The unluckiness of first meeting a woman is, we may note, not
confined to, but merely intensified on New Year's Day; in Shropshire{14}
and in Germany{15} it belongs to any ordinary day.

|325| As to the general attitude towards woman suggested by these
superstitions I may quote a striking passage from Miss Jane Harrison's
"Themis." "Woman to primitive man is a thing at once weak and magical, to
be oppressed, yet feared. She is charged with powers of child-bearing
denied to man, powers only half understood, forces of attraction, but
also of danger and repulsion, forces that all over the world seem to fill
him with dim terror. The attitude of man to woman, and, though perhaps in
a less degree, of woman to man, is still to-day essentially
magical."{16}

"First-foot" superstitions flourish in the north of England and in
Scotland. In the northern counties a man is often specially retained as
"first-foot" or "lucky bird"; in some parts he must be a bachelor, and he
is often expected to bring a present with him--a shovelful of coals, or
some eatable, or whisky.{17} In the East Riding of Yorkshire a boy
called the "lucky bird" used to come at dawn on Christmas morning as well
as on New