Doctor M. Höfler, in his “Volksmedizin und Aberglauben in Oberbayern” (p. 208), says that Bavarian peasants still cherish many superstitions about the sixth day of the week, the day sacred to Freyja, the old German Goddess of Love. Moreover, wonderful amuletic virtues are attributed to hens’ eggs laid during Good Friday night, and whoever eats these eggs is thought to be thereby insured against bodily harm. How long this immunity holds good does not appear; but probably until another Good Friday night egg is eaten. In farmers’ households these precious eggs are therefore eagerly sought by the house-mistress, who is wont to give them to her husband and the farm-hands; or else she uses them as an ingredient of the dough figures which ornament the Easter bread. In some districts of Hungary the following peculiar custom is in vogue:— Whenever any one’s name-day happens on a Friday, that person selects a piece of one of his cast-off garments, rubs thereon a few drops of his own blood and saliva, and then burns the fragment of clothing. By so doing he burns up also all the ill luck which else might have befallen him during the next year. In southeastern Transylvania a rag mystically dealt with as above is hung on a tree before sunrise on the day in question; if it disappear before dawn of the next day, the person who thus superstitiously celebrates the occurrence of his name-day on a Friday may laugh at ill luck for a year.[445] The Magyars begin no work on a Friday, for it is bound to miscarry; neither do they give any milk out of the house on that day, for by so doing they imagine the usefulness of the cow to be impaired. In Bihar County, Hungary, a loaf of bread baked on Friday and impaled upon a stick is accounted a safeguard against the spread of fire. The natives of this district likewise entertain various curious fancies which are decidedly unique. For example, when a newly born child is knock-kneed, the mother regards it as a changeling. She therefore seats herself on the threshold on a Tuesday or Friday, when witches are abroad, and peremptorily addresses those creatures, demanding the restoration of her own child, whom she believes they have stolen away. “Pfui! Pfui! you scoundrels!” she exclaims, “give it back!”[446]