And there is the following well-known couplet:--"With a four-leaved clover, a double-leaved ash, and a green-topped leave,
You may go before the queen's daughter without asking leave."
But, on the other hand, the finder of the five-leaved clover, it is said,
will have bad luck.
In Scotland [3] it was formerly customary to carry on the person a
piece of torch-fir for good luck--a superstition which, Mr. Conway
remarks, is found in the gold-mines of California, where the men tip a
cone with the first gold they discover, and keep it as a charm to ensure
good luck in future.
Nuts, again, have generally been credited with propitious qualities,
and have accordingly been extensively used for divination. In some
mysterious way, too, they are supposed to influence the population, for
when plentiful, there is said to be a corresponding increase of babies. In
Russia the peasantry frequently carry a nut in their purses, from a belief
that it will act as a charm in their efforts to make money. Sternberg, in his
"Northamptonshire Glossary" (163), says that the discovery of a double
nut, "presages well for the finder, and unless he mars his good fortune
by swallowing both kernels, is considered an infallible sign of
approaching 'luck.' The orthodox way in such cases consists in eating
one, and throwing the other over the shoulder."
The Icelanders have a curious idea respecting the mountain-ash,
affirming that it is an enemy of the juniper, and that if one is planted on
one side of a tree, and the other on the other, they will split it. It is also
asserted that if both are kept in the same house it will be burnt down;
but, on the other hand, there is a belief among some sailors that if rowan-
tree be used in a ship, it will sink the vessel unless juniper be found on
board. In the Tyrol, the Osmunda regalis, called "the blooming fern," is
placed over the door for good teeth; and Mr. Conway, too, in his
valuable papers, to which we have been often indebted in the previous
chapters, says that there are circumstances under which all flowers are
injurious. "They must not be laid on the bed of a sick person, according
to a Silesian superstition; and in Westphalia and Thuringia, no child
under a year old must be permitted to wreathe itself with flowers, or it
will soon die. Flowers, says a common German saying, must in no case
be laid on the mouth of a corpse, since the dead man may chew them,
which would make him a 'Nachzehrer,' or one who draws his relatives to
the grave after him."
In Hungary, the burnet saxifrage (Pimpinella saxifraga) is a mystic
plant, where it is popularly nicknamed Chaba's salve, there being an old
tradition that it was discovered by King Chaba, who cured the wounds
of fifteen thousand of his men after a bloody battle fought against his