Greyfriars Churchyard.

A LEGEND OF NORHAM

In the days, now happily remote, when folks, provided as for a picnic,
laboriously travelled great distances in order to be present at the
execution of some unhappy wretch; in the days when harmless old women,
whose chief fault may probably have been that they were poor and
friendless, and perhaps by age and privation rendered little better than
half-witted, were baited, and dragged by an ignorant and credulous
populace to a fiery or to a watery death, there survived in Scotland yet
another barbarous custom not unworthy to take rank with witch-burning.
It was a custom so pitiless and revolting that the mind shrinks from its
contemplation, for if its victims were not necessarily frail old women,
they were yet human beings guilty of no crime, innocent perhaps of all
but misfortune.

The study of medicine in those days was in its infancy, and many were
the strange virtues attributed to certain herbs, vast the powers claimed
for certain things in nature. Aconitum (or wolf's-bane) for example, was
reputed to "prevail mightily against the bitings of Scorpions, and is of
such force that if the Scorpion pass by where it groweth, and touch the
same, presently he becometh dull, heavy, and senseless, and if the same
Scorpion by chance touch the White Hellebore, he is presently delivered
from his drowiness." A certain root, too, was of sovereign efficacy in
the prevention of rabies in human beings who had been bitten by a mad
dog. In Gerard's _Herbal_, a medical work published in 1596--"Gathered
by John Gerarde of London, Master in Chirurgerie"--it is laid down that
"the root of the Briar-bush is a singular remedy found out by oracle
against the biting of a mad dog." Then, as now, rabies was regarded with
a sickening dread, but in that remote day there had arisen no Pasteur,
and dread too frequently degenerated into panic, and panic, as it ever
does, revealed itself in brutality.

In olden days the remedies generally administered to patients suffering
from the bite of a dog were many and curious, and probably by the
average patient they were regarded in reality rather as something in the
nature of a charm than as medicines. Doubtless they gave confidence to
the person who had been bitten, and, so far, were good. But in very many
cases they got the credit of being infallible remedies solely because in
most instances the dog which had given the bite was no more afflicted
with