If a pig is killed in the wane of the moon, the bacon is sure to shrink in the boiling; if, on the other hand, the pig is killed when the moon is at the full, the bacon will swell. ERICA. Warwick. _Northamptonshire Folk Lore._--There is a singular custom prevailing in some parts of Northamptonshire, and perhaps some of your correspondents may be able to mention other places where a similar practice exists. If a female is afflicted with fits, nine pieces of silver money and nine threehalfpences are collected from nine bachelors: the silver money is converted into a ring to be worn by the afflicted person, and the threehalfpences (_i. e._ 13½_d._) are paid to the maker of the ring, an inadequate remuneration for his labour, but which he good-naturedly accepts. If the afflicted person be a male, the contributions are levied upon females. E. H. _Slow-worm Superstition_ (Vol. viii., p. 33.).--As a child I was always told by the servants that if _any serpent_ was "scotched, not killed," it would revive if it could reach its hole before sunset, but that otherwise it must die. Hence the custom, so universal, of hanging any serpent on a tree after killing it. SELEUCUS. _A Devonshire Charm for the Thrush._--On visiting one of my parishioners, whose infant was ill with the thrush, I asked her what medicine she had given the child? She replied, she had done nothing to it but say the eighth Psalm over it. I found that her cure was to repeat the eighth Psalm over the infant three times, three days running; and on my hesitating a doubt as to the efficacy of the remedy, she appealed to the case of another of her children who had suffered badly from the thrush, but had been cured by the use of no other means. If it was said "with the virtue," it was, she declared, an unfailing cure. The mention, in this Psalm, of "the mouths of babes and sucklings," I suppose led to its selection. W. FRASER. Tor-Mohun. * * * * * OLD JOKES. Every man ought to read the jest-books, that he may not make himself disagreeable by repeating "old Joes" as the very last good things. One book of this class is little more than the copy of another as to the points, with a change of the persons; and the same joke, slightly varied, appears in as many different countries as the same fairy-tale. Seven years ago I found at Prague the "Joe" of the Irishman saying that there were a hundred judges on the bench, because there was one with two cyphers. The valet-de-place told me that when the Emperor and Metternich were together they were called "the council of ten," because they were _eins und zero_. It is interesting to trace a joke back, of which process I send an example. In the very clever version of the Chancellor of Oxford's speech on introducing the new doctors (_Punch_, No. 622.) are these lines: