Erysipelas in Donegal is known as the "rose." It is very common, but can be cured by a stroker. The following is said to have happened. A nurse of a Rector had the "rose," and the doctor was called in. After he was gone, the woman's friends brought in a stroker, who rubbed the nurse with bog moss, and then threw a bucket of bogwater over her in bed. This treatment cured the woman, and is said to be generally in vogue, but is not efficient except the right person does it.[7] In some parts of Yorkshire, sheep's dung is applied as a poultice for the cure of erysipelas. What is more distressing, both to patient and nurse, than whooping cough, or king-cough, as it is sometimes called? A change of air is deemed beneficial to the afflicted one, so the mothers of Hull take their suffering children across the Humber to New Holland and back again. Some call it "crossing strange water." Other people procure a "hairy worm," and suspend it in a flannel cover round the neck of the sufferer, in the belief that as the creature dies and wastes away, so will the cough depart. This custom seems to be the relic of an old belief that something of the nature of a hairy caterpillar was the cause of the cough, and Mr. Tylor, in his _Primitive Culture_,[8] speaks of the ancient homoeopathic doctrine that what hurts will also cure. In Gloucestershire roasted mouse is considered a specific for whooping cough; though in Yorkshire the same diet cure is adopted for croup, while rat pie is the one to be used for whooping cough. The Norfolk peasants tie up a common house spider in a piece of muslin, and when the luckless long-legged spinner dies, the cough will soon disappear. A correspondent of _Notes and Queries_ states that when staying in a village in Oxfordshire, he was informed by an old woman that she and her brothers were cured of whooping cough in the following way. They were required to go, the first thing in the morning, to a hovel at a little distance from their house, where a fox was kept. They carried with them a large can of milk, which was set down before the fox, and when he had taken as much as he cared to drink, the children shared among them what was left. The _Aberdeen Evening Gazette_ of 24th August, 1882, tells of a curious superstition in Lochee:--