A HIGHLAND SUPERSTITION.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 293, 20 May 1875, Page 3

A HIGHLAND SUPERSTITION.

A curious bit of popular superstition is the following, which a gentleman in the neighbourhood of Inverness was good enough to bring recently to public notice:—After breakfast, at which, among other good things, we had some excellent fresh eggs, he suggested that we should go into the kitchen to smoke “and watch,” he said, “what my housekeeper will do with the empty eggshells as the breakfast things are brought up from the parlour.” We went, and stood and watched accordingly, and this is what we saw, chatting with our host the while, that the housekeeper might not suspect that we took any particular interest in her doings —We noticed that when the girl came into the kitchen and laid the tray upon the table, the housekeeper, a staid and respectablelooking woman, well advanced in years, walked over and took the eggshells—there were four or five of them—and, placing them one after another into an egg-cup, she took a small knife and passed it, with a smart tap, through the bottoms, or hitherto unbroken ends of the lot, and then turned away to some other employment. This was all, for our host immediately suggested that we should visit his stables. We were a good deal puzzled; having seen so little, where we expected to have seen a great deal, and that little so seemingly without meaning and purposeless. When we got to the stables, our host asked if we understood the meaning of the old lady’s manner of dealing with the egg-shells. We confessed our profound ignorance, having never before seen—never, at least, seen so as seriously to notice—anything of this kind before. “My housekeeper, you must know,” continued our friend, “is a most excellent woman, but much given to little superstitious observances and harmless glos ragan. She will not allow a single egg-shell to go out of her sight without first making a hole through it, knocking out its bottom, in short—in case, as she has more than once seriously told me, a witch should get hold of it and use it as a boat, in which to set to sea in order to raise violent storms, in which the ablest seamanship could not possibly save hundreds of vessels from being miserably wrecked !” f