FABLE AND FOLKLORE 9 



to it if she is curious as to her future partner in life. 

 She must at once take nine steps forward and nine back- 

 ward, then take off her right shoe: in it she will discover 

 a hair of the man she is to marry — but how to find its 

 owner is not explained ! This bit of rustic divination is 

 plainly transferred from the old English formula toward 

 the first-heard cuckoo, as may be learned from Gay's 

 The Sheperd's Week, 8 which is a treasury of rustic cus- 

 toms in Britain long ago. Says one of the maids : 



Then doff'd my shoe, and by my troth I swear, 

 Therein I spy'd this yellow, frizzled hair. 



This matter of the hair is pure superstition allied to 

 magic, in practicing which, indeed, birds have often been 

 degraded to an evil service very remote from their nature. 

 Thiselton Dyer quotes an Irish notion that "in every- 

 one's head there is a particular hair which, if the swallow 

 can pluck it, dooms the wretched individual to eternal 

 perdition." A Baltimore folklorist warns every lady 

 against letting birds build nests with the combings of 

 her hair, as it will turn the unfortunate woman crazy. 

 Any woman afraid of this should beware of that dear 

 little sprite of our garden shrubbery, the chipping-spar- 

 row, for it always lines its tiny nest with hair. This 

 notion is another importation, for it has long been a 

 saying in Europe that if a bird uses human hair in its 

 nest the owner of the hair will have headaches and later 

 baldness. Curiously enough the Seneca Indians, one of 

 the five Iroquois tribes, are said to have long practised 

 a means, as they believed it to be, of communicating with 

 a maiden-relative, after her death, by capturing a fledg- 

 ling bird with a noose made from her hair. The bird 

 was kept caged until it began to sing, when it was libe- 



