Some years ago, a Golspie fisherman who owned a small boat was favored with an extraordinary run of luck in his fishing, and as a result of his good fortune was enabled to buy a larger vessel, selling the old one to a neighbor. From that time, however, his lucky star seemed to wane, and good “catches” were infrequent. Casting about in his mind for the reason of this, he bethought him of a stallion’s shoe which was fastened inside his former boat, and which had been given him by a “wise person.” But both boat and horse-shoe were now in the hands of his neighbor, who maintained with reason that the lucky token was now _his_ property, as he had purchased “the boat and its gear.” And ever thereafter the disconsolate fisherman attributed his lack of success in that season to his own folly in having parted with the stallion’s shoe.[207] The horse-shoe figures often in traditions of the sea as a protection to sailors. When the ghostly ship of the Flying Dutchman meets another vessel, some of its uncanny crew approach the latter in a boat and beg them to take charge of a packet of letters. These letters must be nailed to the mast, else some misfortune will overtake the ship; especially if there be no Bible on board, nor any horse-shoe fastened to the foremast. In the month of September, 1825, lightning struck a brigantine which lay at anchor in the Bay of Armiso, in the Adriatic. A sailor was killed by the bolt, and tradition says that on one of his hips was seen the perfect representation of a horse-shoe, a counterpart of one nailed to the vessel’s foremast in accordance with the custom in vogue on the Mediterranean.[208] The same custom is common in German inland waters, as, for example, on the river craft which ply on the Elbe below Hamburg, and on those which navigate the Trave, at Lubec. On the latter vessels horse-shoes are usually fastened to the stern-post, instead of to the mast. In a German work, entitled “Seespuk,” by P. G. Heims, page 138, the writer remarks that, among seafaring people, the old pagan emblem, the horse-shoe, whose talismanic origin is so closely associated with horse-sacrifice and the use of horse-flesh as food among the heathen nations of the North, is even now the most powerful safeguard aboard ship against lightning and the powers of evil. There are comparatively few small vessels laden with wood, fruit, vegetables, or other merchandise, sailing between Baltic Sea ports, upon whose foremast, or elsewhere upon deck, horse-shoes are not nailed. Indeed, continues the same writer, this symbol has a notable significance in German art as well, a fact attributable less to its graceful curving shape than to the deeply rooted superstitions, relics of barbaric times, which yet cling to it.