NOTES ON ESSEX DIALECT AND FOLK-LORE. 79
Round our coast sea-gulls are considered ominous. The following rhyme I
heard at Walton :
" Sea gull, sea gull, sit on the sand,
It's never good weather when you're on land."
Insects.—During harvest, reapers take very great care not to
injure a large kind of "daddy-long-legs," known to them as "harvest
men," under the idea that it is unlucky to kill one.
Crickets about a house are considered lucky, but it is believed
(especially in the Tendring Hundred) that they eat holes in the
stockings of those that kill them. The "Death's-head Moth" is ever
looked upon with suspicion and dread. A capture of a very fine
specimen was made by Mr. A. J. Furbank at Maldon, on Sept. 15th,
1888, on the occasion of the Essex Field Club's excursion down the
Blackwater (See Essex Naturalist, vol. ii., p. 188). The calamity
which befell the Club was that the barge was becalmed some sixteen
miles from Maldon. Had the members been believers in super-
stition the reason would not have been difficult to discover.
There are various beliefs concerning bees. At Hyde Green,
Ingatestone, I inquired of some cottagers how the bees were, they
said, "They have all gone away since the death of poor Dick, as we
forgot to knock at the hives to tell them he was gone dead."
Matters referring to the household come in for a large share of
beliefs.
A popular notion in Essex is that a mild winter is less healthy
than a cold one :—
"A green Christmas makes a fat churchyard,"
but the returns of the Registrar-General prove the contrary ; the
mortality of the winter months being always in proportion to the
intensity of the cold.
Candles are not without their omens. A collection of tallow
rising up against the wick of a candle is called in Essex a winding
sheet, and looked upon as an omen of death in the family. A bright
spark on the wick tells that a letter is coming to the house, and that
the person towards whom it comes will be the one to receive it.
The belief in witchcraft has not entirely lost its hold amongst our
rural population, and against it one of the best preservatives is a horse
shoe.
Bodily ailments present a wide field for folk-lore, and remedies
for every conceivable ill that flesh is heir to are to be found in the
notions of our village wise-women. Some of the prescriptions are of