As an antidote against the bite of a dog, you must procure some of the hair of the dog that has bitten you. This has passed into a proverb among habitual topers, with particular reference to taking another “nip.” There is also a more or less current belief, better grounded perhaps than many others of a like nature, that a dog which has bitten a person should not be killed until unmistakable symptoms of rabies have appeared. Who does not remember the “blue-glass craze” of some fifteen years ago, which spread like wildfire over the land, and as suddenly died out? Whole communities went blue-glass mad. It was enough for some one to have advanced the theory that the cerulean rays were a cure-all, for everybody to accept it with as much confidence as if it had been one of the demonstrated facts of science. Dealers in blue-glass were about the only ones to benefit by the craze which infallibly suggests its own moral, namely, that credulity has not wholly disappeared. Is this doubted when hardly a day goes by in which some miraculous cure is not heralded abroad by the newspapers? Sometimes it is performed merely by the laying on of hands; and most often without the aid of medicines. Indeed, within a few years, there has sprung up a new school of healing, numbering its tens of thousands proselytes, which not only sets all the best established principles and traditions of the old schools at defiance, but also literally “throws physic to the dogs.” The practice of dipping in the healing waters of the ocean as a cure-all, or preventive of disease for the coming year, formerly prevailed on the Maine coast, particularly at Old Orchard Beach and in the immediate neighborhood, to a very great extent. In its nature and inception the practice certainly more nearly approached the character of those annual pilgrimages made to the famous shrines of the Old World than anything which has come to my notice. Not to mince words, it proceeded from the same superstitious idea, just how originating no one can say. So, every year, on the anniversary of St. John the Baptist’s day, a curious assemblage of country-folk, for miles around, moved by a common impulse, wended their way to the nearest beaches, there to dip in the briny waters, believed to be invested with especial healing powers on this day only, like the bargains advertised to draw custom, and thereby be freed from all the ills which flesh is heir to. On that sacramental day of days, one saw a long string of nondescript wagons, loaded with old and young, moving along the sandy roads leading down from their inland homes to the salt sea. Even the school children thought that they, too, must dip, in imitation of their elders. For some unknown reason, the day, which not only had the sanction of long custom but also is hallowed by such venerated traditions, was given up for the 26th, which is quite like any other day of the year.