COUNTRY PLACES. 185 



Brother was so cross 

 Sat him on a horse, 

 Horse was so randy 

 Gave him some brandy, 

 Brandy was so strong 

 Put him in the pond, 

 Pond was so deep 

 Put him in the cradle and 

 rocked him off to sleep. 



It is curious that there seems to be a distinct race ot 

 flat heads among the cottagers ; the children look as if 

 the front part of the head had been sat upon and com- 

 pressed. Straw hats, the common sort, seem to be made 

 to fit these shallow crowns. In some parts they cook 

 dates ; others cook oranges, making them into dumplings 

 and also stewing them. These are favourite sweets. To 

 go out singing from door to door at Christmas is called 

 wassailing — a relic of the ancient time when wassail was 

 a common word. When I was a boy, among other out- 

 of-the-way pursuits, I took an interest in astrology. The 

 principal work on astrology, from which all the others 

 have been more or less derived, is Ptolemy's * Tetra- 

 biblos,' and there, pointing out the mysterious influence of 

 one thing upon another, it mentions that the virtues of 

 the magnet may be destroyed by rubbing it with garlic. 

 This curious statement has been thrown against Ptolemy 

 and held to invalidate his theories, because upon experi- 

 ment garlic is not found to affect the magnet. Possibly, 

 however, the plant Ptolemy meant may not have been 

 the plant we now call garlic, for there is nothing so un- 

 certain as the names of plants. There is a great confu- 

 sion, and it is difficult to identify with certainty appa- 

 rently well-known herbs with those used by the ancients. 

 Possibly, too, the experiment was performed in a dif- 

 ferent manner. It happened one day, many years after 



