BOSS TERNS. 



59 



The spores or seeds of all ferns are exceedingly minute, 

 and in former times it was believed that thej could only 

 be seen on St. John's Night, at the hour when the Baptist 

 was born, and that whoever became possessed of them 

 was thereby rendered invisible. 



" Eut on St. John's mysterious night. 



Sacred to many a wizard spell, 

 The time when first to liuman sight 



Confest the mystic fern-seed fell: 

 Beside the sloe's black knotted thorn, 

 What hour the Baptist stem was born — 

 That hour when heaven's breath is still — 

 I'll seek the shaggy fern-clad hill, 

 Where time has delved a dreary dell, 

 Befitting best a hermit's cell ; 

 And watch, 'mid murmurs muttering stern, 

 The seed departing from the fern, 

 Ere wakeful demons can convey 

 The wonder-working charm away, 

 And tempt the blows from arm unseen, 

 Should thoughts unholy intervene." 



" Fern-seed," says G-rose, " is looked on as having great 

 magical powers, and must be gathered on Midsummer 

 Eve. A person who went to gather it reported that the 

 spirits whisked by his ears, and sometimes struck his hat, 

 and parts of his body ; and, at length, when he thought 

 he had got a good quantity of it, and secured it in papers 

 and a box, when he came home he found both empty.'* 

 Torreblanca suspected those persons of witchcraft who 

 gathered fern-seed on Midsummer Eve. 



Brand states in his " Popular Antiquities " that a re- 

 spectable countryman, at Heston in Middlesex, informed 

 him in June, 1793, that, when he was a young man, he 

 was often present at the ceremony of catching the fern- 

 ^^eed at midnight on the Eve of St. John Eaptist. The 

 attempt, he said, was often unsuccessful, for the seed was 

 to fall on the plate of its own accord, and that too with- 

 out shaking the plant." 



Ben Jonson, in one of his plays, says, alluding to this 

 custom : 



"I had 



No medicine, sir, to go invisible- 

 No fern-seed in my pocket." 



Those ancestors of ours imagining that ferns produced a 



