Right round my garden There I found a farden, Gave it to my mother To buy a little brother, Brother was so cross Sat him on a horse, Horse was so randy Gave him some brandy, Brandy was so strong Put him in the pond, Pond was so deep Put him in the cradle and rocked him off to sleep. It is curious that there seems to be a distinct race of flat heads among the cottagers; the children look as if the front part of the head had been sat upon and compressed. Straw hats, the common sort, seem to be made to fit these shallow crowns. In some parts they cook dates; others cook oranges, making them into dumplings and also stewing them. These are favourite sweets. To go out singing from door to door at Christmas is called wassailing--a relic of the ancient time when wassail was a common word. When I was a boy, among other out-of-the-way pursuits, I took an interest in astrology. The principal work on astrology, from which all the others have been more or less derived, is Ptolemy's 'Tetrabiblos,' and there, pointing out the mysterious influence of one thing upon another, it mentions that the virtues of the magnet may be destroyed by rubbing it with garlic. This curious statement has been thrown against Ptolemy and held to invalidate his theories, because upon experiment garlic is not found to affect the magnet. Possibly, however, the plant Ptolemy meant may not have been the plant we now call garlic, for there is nothing so uncertain as the names of plants. There is a great confusion, and it is difficult to identify with certainty apparently well-known herbs with those used by the ancients. Possibly, too, the experiment was performed in a different manner. It happened one day, many years after reading this, I chanced to be talking to a village clockmaker about watches. We were discussing what a difficulty it was sometimes to get a watch to go right. I said I had heard that watches sometimes got magnetised, and went on in the most erratic manner until the magnetism was counteracted. Ah yes, he said, he recollected a case in the shop where he learnt his trade; they had a watch brought to them which had got magnetised, and he believed the influence was at last removed by the use of onions. Instantly memory ran back to Ptolemy's garlic; perhaps after all there was something in his statement; at all events, it is very curious that the subject should come up again in this unexpected way, in the darkness, as it were, of a village where the very name of the great mathematician was unknown. The clockmaker fumbled with an anecdote, and tried to tell me of another sort of magnetism which had got into a watch. The watch would not keep time, nothing would make it; till by-and-by it occurred to him to suggest to the owner to wind it up at breakfast-time instead of at night. For he fancied the owner became a little magnetised himself at night over the genial bowl, and so was irregular in winding his watch. FIELD WORDS AND WAYS.