of a salute from each. I told them I supposed there was a fee due, and was answered in the affirmative; and having satisfied the damsels in this respect, they retired to ‘heave’ others.” The usage is said to be a vulgar commemoration of the event which the festival of Easter celebrates. Lancashire, Staffordshire, and Warwickshire still retain the Easter custom. Whether or not the notable Norfolk “chairing” takes its origin from the same is open to question; _possibility_ there is without doubt that it does so. Be it as it may, it must, we fear, be numbered among the departed joys of the poor folks. CHAPTER VII. SUPERSTITIONS. _Superstitions_.—_Witchcraft_.—_Heard’s Ghost_.—_Wise Men and Women_.—_Sayings by Mrs. Lubbock_.—_Prophecies_.—_Treasure Trove_.—_Confessions of Sir William Stapleton and Sir Edward Neville_.—_Cardinal Wolsey supposed to have been conversant with Magic_.—_Effect of Superstition on the Great and Noble in Early Times_. Forby, in his “Vocabulary of East Anglia,” has described the whole of this district of the country as barren of superstitions or legendary lore. Its characteristics are adverse to the growth of that natural poetry in the minds of the people which gives birth to nymphs, water-sprites, elves, or demons. It has neither woods, mountains, rocks, caverns, nor waterfalls, to be the nurseries of such genii; its plains are cultivated, its rivers navigable, its hills and valleys furrowed by the plough, even to the very basement of any lingering ruin of tower or steeple that may be scattered amongst them. How much more, therefore, may we expect to find a dearth of such literature in the heart of the great city, where the struggles of working-day life among looms and factories, leave little time or room for aught else than the stern _realities_ of existence to be known or felt? But every where there exist some fragments of superstition, poetical or uncouth; and we may not feel surprise that among such a people as the lower orders of society, in an East Anglian manufacturing city, they should bear little trace of the refinement which beautiful and romantic scenery and occupation are wont in other scenes to throw over them. Rarely do we hear of a haunted house, or a walking ghost; but not unseldom do we see the horse-shoe nailed over the door-way of the cottage, as an antidote to the power of witchcraft,—nor is it uncommon to hear among the poor, of charms to cure diseases, of divinations by _wise men_ and _wise women_, who by mystic rites pretend to discover lost or stolen property,—nor even of animals bewitched, exercising direful influence over the lives and health of human beings. Within the limits of this age of enlightenment and civilization, many are the recorded facts of this nature, and many more of continual recurrence might be added, in illustration of the truth, that the lowest and grossest forms of vulgar superstition yet lurk about in the purlieus and by-ways of the old city.