The following is from the _Stamford Mercury_, December 18, 1885: ‘At Ketton, on Tuesday, an inquest was held by Mr. Shield, coroner, touching the death of Harry Baker, aged twenty-three, who was missed on the night of November 27, after the termination of the polling for the county election, and was believed to have walked into the ford, near the stone bridge, during the darkness. The river at that time was running strongly, and deceased had no companions with him. The dragging-irons from Stamford were obtained, and a protracted search was made in the river, but without result. However, in obedience to the wish of Baker’s mother, a loaf charged with quicksilver (said to have been scraped from an old looking-glass) was cast upon the waters, and it came to a standstill in the river at the bottom of Mr. Lewin’s field. Here the grappling-hooks were put in, and at four o’clock on Monday afternoon last the corpse was brought to the surface, having been in the water seventeen days. The river had been dragged several times before at this spot.’ Nor is this superstition confined to England, for in Brittany, when the body of a drowned man cannot be found, a lighted taper is fixed in a loaf consecrated to St. Nicholas, which is then abandoned to the retreating current, and where the loaf stops there they expect to find the body. In Germany the name of the drowned person is inscribed on the bread. And a somewhat similar idea seems to obtain among the Canadian Indians, for Sir Jas. E. Alexander, in his _L’Acadie_ (p. 26), says: ‘The Indians imagine that in the case of a drowned body its place may be discovered by floating a chip of cedar-wood, which will stop and turn round over the exact spot. An instance occurred within my own knowledge in the case of Mr. Lavery, of Kingston Mill, whose boat overset, and the person was drowned near Cedar Island; nor could the body be discovered until the experiment was resorted to.’ Aubrey (_Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme_) says he had the following from old Mr. Frederick Vaughan: ‘The Friar’s Mendicant heretofore would take their opportunity to come to the houses when the good woemen did bake, and would _read a Ghospel over the batch_, and the good woman would give them a cake, etc. It should seem by Chaucer’s tale that they had a fashion to beg in rhyme— “Of your white bread I would desire a shiver, And of your hen, the liver.”’ And Aubrey’s friend, Dr. White Kennet, says in the same book: ‘In Kent and many other parts the women when they have kneaded their dough into a loaf cut ye form of a cross on the top of it.’ I have been favoured by the Rev. T. F. Thiselton-Dyer, whose works on folk-lore are so deservedly well known, with the following notes on superstitions about bread: