(M44) As in Europe we nail toothache or fever to a wall, so in Morocco they nail devils. A house in Mogador having been infested with devils, who threw stones about it in a way that made life a burden to the inmates, a holy man was called in to exorcise them, which he did effectually by pronouncing an incantation and driving a nail into the wall; at every stroke of the hammer a hissing sound announced that another devil had received his quietus.(220) Among the modern Arabs the soul of a murdered man must be nailed down. Thus if a man be murdered in Egypt, his ghost will rise from the ground where his blood was shed: but it can be prevented from doing so by driving a new nail, which has never been used, into the earth at the spot where the murder was committed. In Tripoli the practice is similar. Some years ago a native was murdered close to the door of a little Italian inn. Immediately the Arabs of the neighbourhood thronged thither and effectually laid the ghost with hammer and nail. When the innkeeper rashly attempted to remove the nail, he was warned that to do so would be to set the ghost free.(221) In modern Egypt numbers of people afflicted with headache used to knock a nail into the great wooden door of the old south gate of Cairo, for the purpose of charming away the pain; others who suffered from toothache used to extract a tooth and insert it in a crevice of the door, or fix it in some other way, in order to be rid of toothache for the future. A holy and miraculous personage, invisible to mortal eyes, was supposed to have one of his stations at this gate.(222) In Mosul also a sheikh can cure headache by first laying his hands on the sufferer’s head and then hammering a nail into a wall.(223) Not far from Neuenkirchen, in Oldenburg, there is a farmhouse to which, while the Thirty Years’ War was raging, the plague came lounging along from the neighbouring town in the shape of a bluish vapour. Entering the house it popped into a hole in the door-post of one of the rooms. The farmer saw his chance, and quick as thought he seized a peg and hammered it into the hole, so that the plague could not possibly get out. After a time, however, thinking the danger was past, he drew out the peg. Alas! with the peg came creeping and curling out of the hole the blue vapour once more. The plague thus let loose seized on every member of the family in that unhappy house and left not one of them alive.(224) Again, the great plague which devastated the ancient world in the reign of Marcus Antoninus is said to have originated in the curiosity and greed of some Roman soldiers, who, pillaging the city of Seleucia, came upon a narrow hole in a temple and incautiously enlarged the opening in the expectation of discovering treasure. But that which came forth from the hole was not treasure but the plague. It had been pent up in a secret chamber by the magic art of the Chaldeans; but now, released from its prison by the rash