y all burned except one. Again they held this finger
to the fire, but still it would not burn, at which they appeared much
surprised, and one said, 'There must surely be some one in the house
who is not yet asleep.' They then hung the hand with its four burning
fingers by the chimney, and went out to call their associates. But the
maid followed them instantly and made the door fast, then ran up stairs,
where the landlord slept, that she might wake him, but was unable,
notwithstanding all her shaking and calling. In the mean time the
thieves had returned and were endeavouring to enter the house by a
window, but the maid cast them down from the ladder. They then took a
different course, and would have forced an entrance, had it not occurred
to the maid that the burning fingers might probably be the cause of her
master's profound sleep. Impressed with this idea she ran to the kitchen
and blew them out, when the master and his men-servants instantly
awoke, and soon drove away the robbers." The same event is said to have
occurred at Stainmore in England; and Torquermada relates of Mexican
thieves that they carry with them the left hand of a woman who has died
in her first childbed, before which talisman all bolts yield and all
opposition is benumbed. In 1831 "some Irish thieves attempted to commit
a robbery on the estate of Mr. Naper, of Loughcrew, county Meath. They
entered the house armed with a dead man's hand with a lighted candle in
it, believing in the superstitious notion that a candle placed in a dead
man's hand will not be seen by any but those by whom it is used; and
also that if a candle in a dead hand be introduced into a house, it will
prevent those who may be asleep from awaking. The inmates, however, were
alarmed, and the robbers fled, leaving the hand behind them." [31]

In the Middle Ages the hand of glory was used, just like the
divining-rod, for the detection of buried treasures.

Here, then, we have a large and motley group of objects--the forked
rod of ash or hazel, the springwort and the luck-flower, leaves,
worms, stones, rings, and dead men's hands--which are for the most part
competent to open the way into cavernous rocks, and which all agree
in pointing out hidden wealth. We find, moreover, that many of these
charmed objects are carried about by birds, and that some of them
possess, in addition to their generic properties, the specific power of
benumbing people's senses. What, now, is the common ori