_Ague._--No complaint, perhaps, has offered more opportunities for the employment of charms than this one, owing in a great measure to an old superstition that it is not amenable to medical treatment. Thus, innumerable remedies have been suggested for its cure, many of which embody the strangest superstitious fancies. According to a popular notion, fright is a good cure, and by way of illustration we may quote the case of a gentleman, afflicted by this disease in an aggravated form, who entertained a great fear of rats. On one occasion he was accidentally confined in a room with one of these unwelcome visitors, and the intruder jumped upon him. The intensity of his alarm is said to have driven out the ague, and to have completely cured him. An amusing anecdote is also told of a poor woman who had suffered from this unenviable complaint for a long time. Her husband having heard of persons being cured by fright, one day came to her with a very long face, and informed her that her favourite pig was dead. Her first impulse was to rush to the scene of the catastrophe, where she found to her great relief that piggy was alive and well. The fright, however, had done its work, and from that day forth she never had a touch of ague, although she resided in the same locality. A Sussex remedy prescribes "seven sage leaves to be eaten by the patient fasting seven mornings running;" and in Suffolk the patient is advised to take a handful of salt, and to bury it in the ground, the idea being that as the salt dissolves so he will lose his ague. A Devonshire piece of folk-lore tells us that a person suffering from ague may easily give it to his neighbour by burying under his threshold a bag containing the parings of a dead man's nails, and some of the hairs of his head. Some people wear a leaf of tansy in their shoes, and others consider pills made of a spider's web equally efficacious, one pill being taken before breakfast for three successive mornings. _Bleeding of the Nose._--A key, on account of the coldness of the metal of which it is composed, is often placed on the person's back; and hence the term "key-cold" has become proverbial, an allusion to which we find in _King Richard III._ (Act i., sc. 2), where Lady Anne, speaking of the corpse of King Henry VI., exclaims:-- "Poor key-cold figure of a holy king." A Norfolk remedy consists in wearing a skein of scarlet silk round the neck, tied with nine knots in the front. If the patient is a male, the silk should be put on and the knots tied by a female, and _vice versâ_. In some places a toad is killed by transfixing it with some sharp-pointed instrument, after which it is enclosed in a little bag and suspended round the neck. _Burn or Scald._--According to a deep-rooted notion among our rural population, the most efficacious cure for a scald or burn is to be found in certain word-charms, mostly of a religious character. One example runs as follows:--