ich
was the real Christmas-day, and to settle the point three men agreed to
decide by watching that plant. They gathered a bunch at eleven o'clock
at night of the old Christmas-day; it was then in bud. They threw it
upon the table, and did not look at it until after midnight, when they
went in, and found the bloom just dropping off.

Concerning the weather, she says, when a sundog (or two black spots to be
seen by the naked eye) comes on the south side of the sun, there will be
fair weather; when on the north, there will be foul. "The sun then fares
to be right muddled and crammed down by the dog."

Of the moon, she says--

"Saturdays new and Sundays full
Never was good, and never _wull_.

"If you see the old moon with the new, there will be stormy weather.

"If it rains on a Sunday before mass,
It rains all the week, more or less.

"If it rains on a Sunday before the church doors are open, it will rain
all the week, more or less; or else we shall have three rainy Sundays.

"If it rains the first Thursday after the moon comes in, it will rain,
more or less, all the while the moon lasts, especially on Thursdays.

"If there be bad weather, and the sun does not shine all the week, it
will always show forth some time on the Saturday.

"It will not be a hard winter when acorns abound, and there are no hips
nor haws:

"If _Noah's Ark shows_ many days together,
There will be foul weather.

"On three nights in the year it never lightens (_i.e._ clears up)
anywhere; and if a man knew those nights, he would not turn a dog out.

"We shall have a severe winter when the swallows and martins take great
pains to teach their young ones to fly; they are going a long journey, to
get away from the cold that is coming. It is singular they should know
this, but they do.

"The weather will be fine when the rooks play pitch-halfpenny--_i.e._
when, flying in flocks, some of them stoop down and pick up worms,
imitating the action of a boy playing pitch-halfpenny.

"There will be severe winter and deep snow when snow-banks (_i.e._ white
fleecy clouds) hang about the sky."

In 1845, she knew there would be a failure of some crop, "because the
evening star _rode so low_. The leading star (_i.e._ the last star in
the Bear's Tail) was above it all the summer the potato blight occurred."
She feared the failure would have been in the wheat, till she saw the
_man's face_ in it, and then she was comfortable, and