So, too, the poetry of the district has its own characteristics, which it shares with that of the neighbouring western counties. The homeliness of the songs in the West of England strangely contrasts with the wild spirit of those of the North, founded as the latter so often are on the border forays and raids of former times. None which I have collected are direct enough in their bearing on the New Forest to warrant quotation, and I must content myself with this general expression.[214] To pass on to other matters, let us notice some of the superstitions of the New Forest. No one is now so superstitious, because no one is so ignorant as the West-Saxon. One of the commonest remedies for consumption in the Forest is the “lungs of oak,” a lichen (_Sticta pulmonaria_) which grows rather plentifully on the oak trees; and it is no unfrequent occurrence for a poor person to ask at a chemist’s shop for a “pennyworth of lungs of oak.” So, too, for weak eyes, “brighten,” another lichen, is recommended. I do not know, however, that we must find so much fault in this matter, as the lichens were not very long ago favourite prescriptions with even medical men. Again, another remedy for various diseases used to be the scrapings from Sir John Chydioke’s alabaster figure, in the Priory Church of Christchurch, which has, in consequence, been sadly injured. A specific, however, for consumption is still to kill a jay and place it in the embers till calcined, when it is then drunk at stated times in water. Hares’ brains are recommended for infants prematurely born. Children suffering from fits are, or rather were, passed through cloven ash-trees. Bread baked on Good Friday will not only keep seven years, but is a remedy for certain complaints. The seventh son of a seventh son can perform cures. In fact, a pharmacopœia of such superstitions might be compiled. The New Forest peasant puts absolute faith in all traditions, believing as firmly in St. Swithin as his forefathers did when the saint was Bishop of Winchester; turns his money, if he has any, when he sees the new moon; fancies that a burn is a charm against leaving the house; that witches cannot cross over a brook; that the death’s-head moth was only first seen after the execution of Charles I.; that the man in the moon was sent there for stealing wood from the Forest—a superstition, by the way, mentioned in a slightly different form by Reginald Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, in the fifteenth century.[215] And the “stolen bush,” referred to by Caliban in the _Tempest_ (Act ii. sc. 2), and Bottom in the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ (Act vi. sc. 1), is still here called the “nitch,” or bundle of faggots.[216] Not only this, but the barrows on the plains are named after the fairies, and the peasant imagines, like the treasure-seekers of the Middle-Ages, that they contain untold wealth, and that the Forest wells are full of gold.[217]