have the horse-shoe on the threshold. It should be a horse-shoe that one finds.' He adds: 'In the Bermudas they used to put an iron into the fire when a witch comes in. Mars is enemy to Saturn.' 'Under the porch of Stainfield church, in Suffolk, I saw,' he mentions, 'a tile with a horse-shoe upon it, placed there for this purpose, though one would imagine that holy-water would alone have been sufficient. I am told there are many similar instances.'
Ramsey[1] speaks of nailing shoes on the witches' doors and thresholds to keep them in; and Mr Francis Douce, in his manuscript notes, says; 'The practice of nailing horse-shoes resembles that of driving nails into the walls of cottages among the Romans, which they believed to be an antidote against the plague: for this purpose L. Manlius (a.u.c. 390) was named Dictator,—to drive the nail.'
We have already noticed the singular custom for many centuries prevailing at Oakham, in Rutlandshire. In Monmouth-street, London, Brand,[2] in 1797, saw many shoes nailed to the thresholds of doors; and Henry Ellis, in 1813, counted no less than seventeen in that street fixed against the door-steps.
The fair, but frail, ladies of Amsterdam, in 1687, believed that a horse-shoe which had either been found or stolen, and placed on the chimney-hearth, would bring good luck to their houses.[3]
There is a curious and somewhat remarkable old German saying in reference to a damsel who has met with a
