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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



girls of asking a" daddy-long-legs » to point out the direction m 

 which pasturing cattle maybe found. When I was a little girl 

 in northern ( >hio, many a time, before starting to drive home the 

 cows from a woods-pasture— in which they might easily have 

 wandered out of sight— have I looked about in the angle of a 

 gate-post, or under the cap of a board fence, in whose shady cor- 

 ners the daddy-long-legs often lurk, and, having found one of the 

 torpid beings, seized him by one leg and held him as I repeated 

 our prescribed incantation: 



" Gran'-daddy, gran'-daddy-long-legs, 

 Tell me where my cows are, or I'll kill you ! " 



Naturally, the spider, discomfited by his bondage, would lift 

 one of his legs, and the cows, it was said, would be found in the 

 direction indicated by this uplifted leg. I don't think that we 

 children really believed that this indication would always hold 

 good, or that we even paid very much attention to the path so 

 designated; but, as I remember it, we felt it to be the proper thing 

 to do to consult our oracle, and I doubt not the ceremony sent us 

 off on our evening quest with better courage. The same custom 

 is reported from different parts of New York State, Indiana, Illi- 

 nois, and Tennessee. The incantation varies somewhat with the 

 locality. In Tennessee it is simply — 



"Daddy-long-legs, which way are my cows? " 



An old physician writes me that " in western New York, sixty 



years ago, the verses ran — 



' Grandfather gray-beard, 



Tell me where my cows are, or I'll kill yon ! ' 



After this had been repeated several times in a drawling mono- 

 tone, lengthening out the syllables e gray ' and ' kill/ if the captive 

 lifted a leg and held it suspended for a moment, he was faithfully 

 released; otherwise, he was ruthlessly killed." Certainly there 

 must be some occult connection between these malodorous arach- 

 nids and the cows, for in Tennessee the farmer-boys tell you that 

 killing a grand-daddy-long-legs will make the cows go dry. 



In the pine woodlands of southern Louisiana, so a New Or- 

 leans lady writes, there are found little mounds of mud, with 

 quite a large opening in the center of each — probably crayfish- 

 holes. Negro nurses caution the children under their charge 

 never to touch these tiny mounds, believing that they are snake- 

 holes, and that any meddling will lead the snake which lives there 

 to leave his burrow at night and come and bite the offender. 



In western New York, forty or fifty years ago, the panacea for 

 dirt or other foreign substances in the eye was what the children 

 called " crabs' eye-stones," the two calcareous, lenticular concre- 

 tions found between the stomach-walls of the crayfish. In these 



