"Would curses kill, as doth the bitter mandrake's groans."
[Illustration: GATHERING THE MANDRAKE.]
A favorite mode of uprooting this coveted plant--because of its defensive
properties, when once gained--was to fasten cords to a dog's neck, thence
to the base of the stem of the plant, and sealing their own ears with wax
to prevent hearing the groans, which was death or madness, they whipped
the unfortunate dog till he drew out the roots, or was killed in the
attempt; for the dog usually died then or soon after the cruel beating,
and the shrieks of the mandrake were supposed to have caused his death.
The Scabious, or "Devil's bit," was regarded with great superstition. "The
old fantastic charmers," said the quaint Gerarde, "say that the Devil bit
away the greater part of this root for envy, because of its many virtues
and benefits to mankind." Dr. James Smith (1799) as quaintly observes,
"The malice of the Devil has unfortunately been so successful, that no
virtue can now be found in the remainder of the root or herb."
_House Crickets._--The superstition respecting these cheerful and harmless
little _chirpers_ is remarkable. Some consider their presence a lucky
sign, others their absence more fortunate. To kill one, with some persons,
is a sign of death in the house. Very strange! They, blind fools, do not
see that the saying originated in the death of the poor little cricket.
The following very remarkable occurrence was related to the writer, as
having actually taken place at Providence, R. I., a few years since. Mrs.
D., a respectable lady, residing in the city, was reported to have been
followed about the house and up stairs by a "cricket,"--a wooden one, used
for a foot-stool. People called at her residence to inquire into the truth
of the matter; others even requested to see the remarkable phenomenon of a
cricket or stool walking off on all fours, until the lady became so
annoyed by the continual stream of credulous callers, that she inserted a
notice in the city journals denying the truth of the strange rumor. It was
supposed to have started from some neighbor's seeing or hearing a house
cricket when on a visit at the lady's house.
_The Bowing Images._--A still more amusing story is related respecting the
two images surmounting the wall each side of the gate at the residence of
Professor Gammel, of Providence. A report became current among the
school-boys of the city, that when the images _heard_ the clock strike
nine in the forenoon they bowed their heads. My informant said it was no
unusual thing to see a dozen boys waiting, with books and slates, in front
of the professor's gate, to see the images bow at nine. Being late at
school, the teacher would inquire,--
"Where have you been lingering, that you are behind time at school?"
[Illustration: "WAITING TO SEE THE IMAGES BOW".]
"Been down to Professor Gammel's, waitin' to see the images bow."
Then the teacher drew his ferule or rod, and made them "bow" in submission
to a smart whipping--a sequel anticipated by the older scholars who
instituted the story.
_House Spiders._--Was there ever a child who was not taught, directly or
indirectly, that house spiders were poisonous,--that their bite was
instantaneous death? Was there ever a greater mistake? Many people have a
superstitious terror of these harmless creatures. The bite of spiders is
only poisonous to those insects which the divine economy seems to have
created for them to destroy. It is possible, as by a fly, sometimes for a
slight skin inflammation, less than a mosquito's bite, to follow the sting
of a spider on a very small child.
Let me hereby disabuse the public mind of the repugnance or horror with
which these little creatures are regarded. The Creator has evidently
placed them here for the destruction of flies and other insects, which
otherwise would completely overrun us. The fly is such a domestic
creature, that he soon deserts a house where the family is long absent.
The spider then removes also. (I have watched this proceeding, with no
little interest, in the absence of my own family.) Therefore the spider
was created to suppress a superabundance of insect life. When I have
before stated this fact, the listener has been led to inquire why the
flies were then made. We will not answer the suggestion of this "riddle"
as the Irishman did (you know that he said, "To feed the spiders, to be
sure"), but reply, that if this question is to arise in this connection,
we may as well keep on our inquiry till we arrive at the greater riddle,
"Why are _we_ created?"--to which we have no space for reply.
It is said that manufacturers of quill pens in London, being greatly
annoyed by a species of moth which infests their quills and devours the
feathers, and the common spider being endowed with an inordinate appetite
for those same moths, the penmakers and spiders are on the best of terms,
and an army of these much-maligned and persecuted insects encamp in each
pen factory, and do good service to the cause of literature as well as
trade, by protecting the quills. We may yet find that even mosquitos and
bedbugs have their uses in the wise economy of nature.
Now, when tidy housewifery requires that brush and broom should ruthlessly
demolish the webs,--the wonderful work and mechanism of the one species of
house spider,--let it be done as a necessity, not with a feeling of
repugnance to the harmless little insect; and let children be taught the
truthful lesson that nothing is made in vain.
_The House Cat_, with many, is regarded with unaccountable superstition.
It goes with the witch, particularly the black cat. No witch ever could
exist without one. This is usually the species that haunts naughty boys in
their dreams after they have eaten too heartily of cake, and other
indigestible stuff, at evening.
Cats are as old as time. At least their existence dates back as far as
man's in history, and they were formerly regarded as a sacred animal.
In ancient Egypt we find that Master Tomas, with his round face and rugged
whiskers, symbolized the sun. Preserved in the British Museum are abundant
proofs of the reverence and superstition with which the feline race was
regarded by the Egyptians. Here several of these revered Grimalkins are
mummied in spices, and perfumes, and balsams, in which they have survived
the unknown centuries of the past, "to contrast the value of a dead cat in
the land of the Pharaohs with the fate of such relics in modern times,
ignominiously consigned to the scavenger's cart, or feloniously hanging
upon a tree, the scarecrow of the orchard."
Diodorus, the Greek writer, 1st century B. C., informs us that such was
the superstitious veneration with which the Egyptians regarded cats, that
no one could ruffle the fur of Tom or Tabby with impunity, and that any
man killing a cat was put to death. (O, what a country it must have been
to sleep in!) In Ptolemy's time, while the Roman army was established in
Egypt, one of the Romans killed a cat, when the people flew to his house,
and dragged him forth, and neither the fear of the soldiers nor the
influence of the prince could deliver the unfortunate cat-slayer from the
wrath of the infuriated mob.
Mohammed had a superstition for cats, and was said to have been constantly
attended by one. A cat hospital was founded at Damascus in respect to the
prophet's predilection, which Baumgarten, the German professor (1714 to
1762) found filled with feline inmates. Turkey maintained several public
establishments of this kind.
Howell the Good, king of Wales, 10th century, legislated for the cat
propagation, and it would seem that the race was limited, since a week old
kitten sold for a penny,--a great deal of money in those days,--and
fourpence for one old enough to catch a mouse. The following ludicrous
penalty was attached to a cat-stealer:--
"If any person stole a cat that guarded the prince's granaries he was to
forfeit a milch ewe, fleece, and lamb; or, in lieu of these, as much wheat
as, when poured upon the cat, suspended by the tail, her head touching the
floor, would form a heap high enough to bury her to the tail tip."
This would seem rather hard on poor pussy, even to threatening her
suffocation.
Huc, in his "Chinese Empire," tells us that the Chinese peasantry are
accustomed to tell the noon hour from the narrowing and dilation of the
pupils of pussy's eyes; they are said to be drawn down to a hair's-breadth
precisely at twelve o'clock. This horological utility, however, by no
means gives her a fixed tenure in a Chinese home. There she enters into
the category of edible animals, and, having served the purpose of a
cat-clock, is seen hanging side by side with the carcasses of dogs, rats,
and mice in the shambles of every city and town of the celestial empire.
Descending to the middle ages, a mal-odor of magic taints the fair fame of
our _protégés_, more especially attaching itself to black or brindled
cats, which were commonly found to be the "familiars" of witches; or,
rather, their "familiars" were supposed to take the form of these animals;
and hence, in nearly all judicial records of these unhappy delusionists,
demons in the shape of cats are sure to figure. The witches in "Macbeth"
(for what impression of the times he lived in has Shakspeare lost?)
awaited the triple mewing of the brindled cat to begin their incantations;
and more scientific pretenders to a knowledge of the occult arts are
usually represented as attended in their laboratories by a feline
companion.
Fragments of a superstitious faith in the magical, or what was till
comparatively recent times so nearly allied with it, the medicinal
attributes of the animal, still surviving in certain rustic and remote
districts of England, where the brains of a cat of the proper color
(black, of course) are esteemed a cure for epilepsy; and where, within our
memory, such a faith induced a wretched being, in the shape of woman, mad
with despair and rage, to tear the living heart from one of these animals,
that, by sticking it full of pins and roasting it, she might bring back
the regard of a man, brutal and perfidious as herself. Such formulæ are
frequently to be met with in the works of ancient naturalists and
physicians, and were, doubtlessly, handed down from generation to
generation, and locally acted upon in desperate cases.
It is on evidence that more than one old woman has been condemned by our
wise ancestors to pay the penalty of her presumed league with Satan in a
fiery death, upon no better testimony than the fact that Harper,
Rutterkin, or Robin had been seen entering her dwelling in the shape of a
black cat. But if, in ancient times, old women, and young ones, too, have
been brought to grief through the cats they fostered, certain it is that
these creatures have suffered horrible reprisal at the hands of certain
vagrants of the sex in our own.
Our _Felis domestica_ has, for a long time, labored under the serious
disadvantage of a traditional character. Buffon sums her up as a
"faithless friend, brought in to oppose a still more insidious enemy;" and
Goldsmith--who, it is well known, became a writer of natural history "upon
compulsion," and had neither time nor opportunity for personal observation
of the habits and instincts of the creatures he so charmingly
describes--followed in the track of the great naturalist, and echoes this
ungracious definition.
Boys have a natural contempt for cats, and picking them up by the tail,
tossing them over the wall, or tying old tin pots to their caudal end, to
see how fast they can run, are among their most trifling sports at the
expense of Tom and Tabby. I have known a cruel boy to roll a cat in
turpentine, and set fire to her. Few men have any feeling but repugnance
towards the feline race. The exceptions are in the past.
Cardinal Wolsey's cat sat on the arm of his chair of state, or took up her
position at the back of his throne when he held audiences; and the cat of
the poet Petrarch, after death, occupied, embalmed, a niche in his studio;
indeed, poets appear to be more susceptible of pussy's virtues and graces
than other persons; and she has, on many occasions, been made the subject
of their verse, the sentiment of which fully expresses a sense of the
maligned animal's faithfulness and affection.
Tasso, reduced to such a strait of poverty as to be obliged to borrow a
crown from a friend to subsist on through a week, turns for mute sympathy
to his faithful cat, and disburdens his case in a charming sonnet, in
which he entreats her to assist him through the night with the lustre of
her moon-like eyes, having no candles by which he could see to write his
verses.
[Illustration: SPORT FOR THE BOYS BUT DEATH FOR THE CAT.]
An editor facetiously says, "We have here among us at this time an
addition to the M. D.'s in the shape of two cat doctors, who have the
terrible idea that they were put upon this earth for the sole object of
doctoring cats, and now the mortality list shows, at the least
calculation, that no less than eighteen cats and two kittens have
travelled to that bourn from which no passengers have ever yet returned,
and all because they were the unlucky sons and daughters of ye night
prowlers who had been sacrificed for the good of the future cat
generation."