"What is it for?" I asked. The shrub in question was a bay tree, and in a severe winter in the nineties, had almost died, but last spring it revived somewhat, and sent out a few weakly branches this summer. "What does I want it for?" repeated Mrs. Eccles. "Why I wants it for salvation; to save my boy from the Lightning." Then she went on to tell me, with a burst of eloquence, about the Shropshire belief, to the effect that a spray of bay-leaf, or a feather of an eagle, if worn in a cap or hat, can preserve the wearer from lightning. "The big hawk's feather, there's none as can get now," she said. "The railways and the holiday-makers have killed they, but they have left the bay trees." Then I remembered having heard that Mrs. Eccles's husband, some forty odd years ago, had been killed whilst haymaking, struck by lightning. "'Twas the death of Job, his fork," an old man had once told me. "The lightning came clean down, and struck him by the command of the Lord." "If my gude man had had but a sprig, he might have been hearty now," broke from Mrs. Eccles; and she went on to tell me that her grandson, Joseph Holroyd, "war goin' to work for Farmer Church, and that she had come here, for I know'd as you'd provide." I opened the little knife on my chain, and cut off a sprig and gave it to my old friend. [Sidenote: AN OLD PAGAN BELIEF] She bobbed low, and scuttled away. "Won't you have a cup of tea?" I called after her. But she shook her head, and cried out, "Nay, nay, I have my widdies (ducks) to feed;" and as I stood and looked, the little brown figure disappeared up the drive. When I went back to the east garden, I thought over my conversation with Mrs. Eccles, and I recollected having read somewhere, that the Romans believed that a phoenix's feather, if it could be obtained and worn in the bosom, would avert disaster; and a learned friend once told me that the Emperor Tiberius was much alarmed by thunder, and always wore a wreath of laurel round his neck if the weather was stormy, because he believed that laurels were never blasted by lightning. So I reflected that my old friend, bred amidst the wilds of Shropshire, held, after all, unconsciously an old pagan belief, of which the plume from the big hawk was only another version of the phoenix's feather, whilst the laurel and the bays sprang, likely enough, from the same legend. Whilst revolving the old beliefs of past empires in my mind, I was called back to the present by Bess rushing up to me, and calling out-- "Where have you been Mum, Mum? We shall be late, I know we shall be late. And if Hals didn't find some one to meet him, what would he say?" "I'm sure I don't know," I said penitently. "Nor me," retorted Bess, indignantly.