THE AT LAS TIC FOREST EEGIOX 381 



building of such contrivances for keeping dairy products through the 

 hot spells of summer. 



Many curious old-world customs and beliefs., into which various 

 natural objects entered, took root in the new soils though in a some- 

 what altered form to suit the changed conditions. Much of folk-lore has 

 always been concerned with the weather. Besides the ember-days there 

 was Candlemas with its superstition regarding the sunshine on that 

 day as a prognostication of the remainder of winter. In Germany, if 

 the badger saw his shadow it was an old belief that hard weather would 

 follow for some time. Xo badger appearing on the Atlantic slope, the 

 role of weather prophet was conferred upon the ubiquitous woodchuck 

 or ground-hog whose honors are still fairly even with the weather 

 bureau. So prominent a bird in European folk-lore as the cuckoo ap- 

 pears to have had no representative in this country to take its place, 

 though we might regard the term " rain-crow," bestowed upon its 

 American congener, as a somewhat vague recognition of kindred quali- 

 ties. The art of the divining-rod in locating underground water 

 migrated across the sea with these early settlers, and for this purpose a 

 forked branch of the witch-hazel was used with as sure results, when 

 held by a gifted hand, as that of the elm, the hazel or the willow of 

 the old world. Unfortunately we can not trace the " witch " part of 

 the name back to any certain source in the craft of the broomstick, and 

 " hazel " is but a borrowed title. The shrub has much about it that is 

 peculiar. Among our American underwoods its late autumnal bloom, 

 at the fall of the leaf, and the ripening of its fruit in the next summer 

 are conspicuous and may have appealed to the mystery-loving mind of 

 the seventeenth century. 



Superstition gathered about the strange whippoorwill and its weird 

 twilight call. The Indian peoples, too, seem to have regarded this 

 bird as one of omen and Catesby in his " Xatural History of Carolina " 

 quotes a piece of aboriginal folk-lore to the effect that the bird was 

 unknown to them until after a certain battle when a great many of 

 their people were slain by the Europeans, and that now the birds heard 

 calling in the dusk are the souls of their ancestors. Many fragments 

 of nature folk-lore sprang up in the new world from an old-world 

 transplanting, as to the belief that swallows spent the winter in the 

 mud of ponds and river, and other beliefs quite as curious which have 

 gone into the limbo of the forgotten past. 



In parts of the country, notably in the middle Atlantic region, the 

 planting of plane trees (the sycamore or buttonwood) in the immediate 

 vicinity of farm houses appears to have been a wide-spread custom 

 under the belief that the tree warded off lightning. Whatever may 

 have been the reason for its planting, this tree, with its huge bowl 

 uplifting a crown of branches, and the striking color of its bark — white, 



