l.' It may not hurt him. Against bite of snake if the
man procures and eateth rind which cometh out of Paradise,
no venom will hurt him. Then said he that wrote this book
that the rind was hard gotten."

These manuscripts are so full of word pictures of the treatment of
disease that one feels if one were transported back to those days it
would in most cases be possible to tell at a glance the "cures"
various people were undergoing. Let us visit a Saxon hamlet and go and
see the sick folk in the cottages. On our way we meet a man with a
fawn's skin decorated with little bunches of herbs dangling from his
shoulders, and we know that he is a sufferer from nightmare.[23]
Another has a wreath of clove-wort tied with a red thread round his
neck. He is a lunatic, but, as the moon is on the wane, his family
hope that the wearing of these herbs will prove beneficial. We enter a
dark one-roomed hut, the dwelling of one of the swineherds, but he is
not at his work; for it seemed to him that his head turned about and
that he was faring with turned brains. He had consulted the leech and,
suggestion cures being then rather more common than now, the leech had
advised him to sit calmly by his fireside with a linen cloth wrung out
in spring water on his head and to wait till it was dry. He does so,
and, to quote the words with which nearly all Saxon prescriptions end,
we feel "it will soon be well with him." Let us wend our way to the
cobbler, a sullen, taciturn man who finds his lively young wife's
chatter unendurable. We find him looking more gloomy than usual, for
he has eaten nothing all day and now sits moodily consuming a raw
radish. But there is purpose in this. Does not the ancient leechdom
say that, if a radish be eaten raw after fasting all day, no woman's
chatter the next day can annoy? In another cottage we find that a
patient suffering from elf-shot is to be smoked with the fumes of
herbs. A huge quern stone which has been in the fire on the hearth
all day is dragged out, the prepared herbs--wallwort and mugwort--are
scattered upon it and also underneath, then cold water is poured on
and the patient is reeked with the steam "as hot as he can endure
it."[24] Smoking sick folk, especially for demoniac possession, is a
world-wide practice and of very ancient origin. There is no space here
to attempt to touch on the comparative folk lore of this subject.
Moreover, fumigating the sick with herbs is closely akin to th