According to De Thaun, “The wild Ass, when March in its course has completed twenty-five days, brays twelve times, and also in the night, for this reason, that that season is the equinox—days and nights are of equal length. By the twelve times that it makes its braying and crying it shows that night and day have twelve hours in their circuit. The ass is grieved when he makes his cry that the night and the day have equal length, for he likes better the length of the night than of the day.” One can only read such an extract as this with a feeling of utter wonder; in the first place, how De Thaun could believe such a thing himself, and in the second place, how he could expect anyone else to do so. The exact accuracy of the wild ass as to the day of the month, and his twelvefold bray of regret as each recurring year brings it round again, are triumphs of the imaginative faculty. We may probably infer that when the twenty-ninth day of September has come round again the balance is redressed, hope springs again, and the twelve brays this time are of a peculiarly jubilant and sonorous character. Asses’ hair was in the Middle Ages held to be a sterling remedy for ague, though one must have been credulous indeed to try it. It is interesting more especially perhaps as a foreshadowing of that doctrine of homœopathy which deals with the cure of like by like. Great healing powers are attributed to the hairs from the cross on the donkey’s back: hairs cut from it and suspended in a bag round a child’s neck were a potent influence in the prevention of fits and convulsions. Another famous remedy was the cure of whooping cough by passing the sufferer three times under the belly and three times over the back of a donkey. In Sussex a standard remedy for the same distressing complaint was procured by cutting some of the hair out of the cross, chopping it up finely, and spreading it on bread and butter for the breakfast of the patient; while in Dorsetshire prevention was rightly considered better than cure, and though the rustics may have doubted the efficacy of vaccination as a remedy against small-pox, they had no hesitation whatever in getting their children astride on the donkey’s back as early as possible as a preventative to their ever catching whooping cough. One meets with remedy after remedy of the same general nature, and all owing their efficacy to some mysterious connection between this particular complaint and donkey-hair, but what this occult influence can be is wholly unknown to us.