and gives also an amusing anecdote illustrative of it:--"Our two servant-girls agreed to go on an errand of their own, one night after supper, to a considerable distance, from which I strove to persuade them, but could not prevail; so, after going to the apartment where I slept, I took a drinking-glass, and coming close to the back of the door made two or three sweeps round the lip of the glass with my finger, which caused a loud shrill sound, and then overheard the following dialogue:-- "_B._ 'Ah, mercy! the dead-bell went through my head just now with such a knell as I never heard.' "_I._ 'I heard it too.' "_B._ 'Did you indeed? That is remarkable. I never knew of two hearing it at the same time before.' "_I._ 'We will not go to Midgehope to-night.' "_B._ 'I would not go for all the world! I shall warrant it is my poor brother Wat. Who knows what these wild Irish may have done to him?'" The itching of the nose, like that of the ears, is not without its signification, denoting that a stranger will certainly appear before many hours have passed by, in allusion to which Dekker, in his "Honest Whore," says:--"We shall ha' guests to-day; my nose itcheth so." In the north of England, however, if the nose itches it is reckoned a sign that the person will either be crossed, vexed, or kissed by a fool; whereas an old writer tells us that "when a man's nose itcheth it is a signe he shall drink wine." Many omens, too, are gathered from bleeding of the nose. Thus Grose says, "One drop of blood from the nose commonly foretells death or a very severe fit of sickness; three drops are still more ominous;" and according to another notion one drop from the left nostril is a sign of good luck, and _vice versâ_. Bleeding of the nose seems also to have been regarded as a sign of love, if we may judge from a passage in Boulster's "Lectures," published early in the seventeenth century:--"'Did my nose ever bleed when I was in your company?' and, poor wretch, just as she spake this, to show her true heart, her nose fell a-bleeding." Again, that bleeding of the nose was looked upon as ominous in days gone by, we may gather from Launcelot's exclamation in the _Merchant of Venice_ (Act ii., sc. 5), "It was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last at six o'clock"--a superstition to which many of our old writers refer. Among further superstitions connected with the nose we may mention one in Cornwall, known as "the blue vein," an illustration of which occurs in Mr. Hunt's "Popular Romances of the West of England," who relates the following little anecdote:--"A fond mother was paying more than ordinary attention to a fine healthy-looking child, a boy about three years old. The poor woman's breast was heaving with emotion, and she struggled to repress her sighs. Upon inquiring if anything was really wrong, she said, 'The old lady of the house had just told her that the child could not live long because he had a