The Midwife’s aid to lovers, however, did not stop here. If they wished to create a passion in some heart where it had not previously existed, she told them to get a dormouse and reduce it to powder, a pinch of which, if put into the drink of the person beloved, would immediately rivet his or her affections upon the individual by whose hands it was administered. Many anecdotes are told of humorous miscarriages that resulted from a neglect of this condition. One is especially well known, of a young woman who gave the potion through the hands of her grandmother; and the consequence was, that the bachelor immediately made love to the old lady instead of the young one, and eventually became grandfather to the latter instead of her husband. Indeed, the administering of philtres and the use of charms in Ireland were formerly very frequent, and occasionally attended by results which had not been anticipated. The use especially of _cantharides_, or French flies, in the hands of the ignorant, has often been said to induce madness, and not unfrequently to occasion death. It is not very long since a melancholy case of the latter from this very cause appeared in an Irish newspaper. The Midwife was also a great interpreter of dreams, omens, auguries, and signs of all possible sorts, and no youngsters who ever consulted her need be long at a loss for a personal view of the object of their love. They had only to seek in some remote glen or dell for a briar whose top had taken root in the ground; this they were to put under their pillow and sleep upon, and the certain consequence was, that the image of the future wife or husband would appear to them in a dream. She was also famous at cup-tossing; and nothing could surpass the shrewd and sapient expression of her face as she sat solemnly peering into the grounds of the tea for the imaginary forms of rings, and love-letters, and carriages, which were necessary to the happy purport of her divination, for she felt great reluctance to foretell calamity. She seldom, however, had recourse to card-cutting, which she looked upon as an unholy practice; the cards, as everyone knows, being the only book on which the devil says his prayers night and morning. Who has not heard of his _prayer-book_? We are now to consider the Midwife in the capacity of a woman not only brimful of medicinal knowledge, but possessed of many secrets, which the mere physician or apothecary could never penetrate. As a doctress, she possessed a very high reputation for all complaints incident to children and females; and where herbal skill failed, unlike the mere scientific man of diplomas, she could set physical causes and effects aside, and have recourse at once to the supernatural and miraculous.