veral ways of charming away warts. He says:
"Lancashire wise men tell us for warts to rub them with a cinder, and
this tied up in paper, and dropped where four roads meet, will
transfer the warts to whoever opens the parcel. Another mode of
transferring warts is to touch each wart with a pebble, and place the
pebbles in a bag, which should be lost on the way to church; whoever
finds the bag gets the warts." A common Warwickshire custom was to rub
the warts with a black snail, stick the snail on a thorn bush, and
then, say the folks, as the snail dies so will the wart
disappear.[163]

Warts, on the other hand, seem in certain cases to be considered
lucky. In "Syr Gyles Goosecappe, Knight," a play of 1606, Lord Momford
is made to say: "The Creses here are excellent good: the proportion
of the chin good; the little aptnes of it to sticke out; good. And the
wart aboue it most exceeding good."

_Wen._--A newspaper of 1777 reports: "After he (Doctor Dodd) had hung
about ten minutes, a very decently dressed young woman went up to the
gallows in order to have a wen in her face stroked by the Doctor's
hand; it being a received opinion among the vulgar that it is a
certain cure for such a disorder. The executioner, having untied the
Doctor's hand, stroked the part affected several times therewith."

At the execution of Crowley, a murderer of Warwick, in 1845, a similar
scene is described in the newspapers: "At least five thousand persons
of the lowest of the low were mustered on this occasion to witness the
dying moments of the unhappy culprit.... As is usual in such cases (to
their shame be it spoken) a number of females were present, and
scarcely had the soul of the deceased taken its farewell flight from
its earthly tabernacle, than the scaffold was crowded with members of
the 'gentler sex' afflicted with wens in the neck, with white
swellings in the knees, &c., upon whose afflictions the cold clammy
hand of the sufferer was passed to and fro for the benefit of his
executioner."[164]

_Whooping-Cough._--It was a common belief in Devonshire, Cornwall, and
some other parts of England, that if one inquired of any one riding on
a piebald horse of a remedy for this complaint, whatever he named was
regarded as an infallible cure. In Suffolk and Norfolk, a favorite
remedy was to put the head of a suffering child for a few minutes into
a hole made in a meadow. It must be done in the evening with only the
father and mother to witn