The compilers of _Kentucky Superstitions_ have in a fashion perfectly impartial printed all they have found (with some expurgations) without distinction of age or novelty, universality or locality. “The good die young,” according to one of the citations; and “No news is a sign of good news.” Such notions belong to folk-lore everywhere. Others among these Kentucky superstitions are more specific: “If once you get your feet wet in the Cumberland River, you will always return to the Kentucky Mountains”; “It is firmly believed by the people of Leslie County, a mountain county, that President McKinley’s name was written by spiders in their webs as a prophecy of his death.” There are ceremonies for May Day that point to the rites of Flora: “To become beautiful, wash your face in dew before sunrise on May Day”; there are quaint fancies about Christmas old-style, such as that “At midnight of Old Christmas the elders bloom”; there are sortileges and incantations, divinations and auguries, weather wisdom, dream-lore, signs of the moon and of the zodiac, witchcraft and hoodoos. The most numerous of all are concerned with animals, birds, insects, and reptiles; then follow cures and preventives, divinations concerning love (most of them practised by girls), weather, household and domestic life, the human body, in the order named. The total result is an amazing palimpsest, as if each new generation had written its lore upon an original manuscript, partly erasing the old symbols and partly employing them to make new symbols; altering the old text or adapting it; adding new illustrations or comments; bringing in fresh material that flatly contradicts the old. One superstition says that “If you take the next to the last biscuit on the plate, you will never marry”; but another, that in such an event “you will have a handsome husband.” A merely mnemonic change may alter the whole point of a saying: “A whistling woman or a crowing hen never comes to a very good end”; but “A woman that whistles, or a hen that crows, has her way wherever she goes.” Most of these superstitions are, of course, held by few people, and many by no one very seriously. The more highly educated sections of the state, while represented by a large number of superstitions, report rather trivial ones, for the reason that they are of little importance in the life of these sections. The mountain whites and the Negroes cherish a larger number of superstitions, which are more barbarous but obviously more authentic than those of the lowland whites. “If you drink water out of a stranger’s shoe,” they say in the mountains, “your sore throat will be cured.” This is not so casual an invention as the notion that “It brings bad luck to see an empty street-car.” “If you curse God and shoot at the sun, you will be able to see the wind,” according to mountain doctrine: according to the Louisville Negroes, “If you cut your eyelashes, you will be able to see the wind.”