and the part, on which it was to be kneaded, our cockle and the French coquille being so near in sound. The quotation from Burchardus is important, because it demonstrates that the practice was not confined to the young, but was a general usage among females. The late Mr. Coote had heard part of the rhyme given above employed in his time by a nurse to a baby, as she tossed it in her lap:

Up with your heels, and down with your head,

That is the way to make cockle-bread, which is a singular instance not only of survival, but of distortion. Taking this usage of cockle-bread and its sundry outgrowths as a whole, it has merely to be predicated of it, I think, that we owe our knowledge of such practices to the casual removal of the veil, and by men working on totally different lines, like Aubrey and Burchardt, from the darker phases of the human character and the hidden impurities of life. That libidinous impulses are capable of these and similar excesses, no one required to be told; but the Apostles of Folk-lore, Aubrey, and Burchardt, the publisher of real or supposed scenes in the Confessional, have, each from his own point of view, disclosed here a touch of the less divine part of their own physiology and ours. They have given a few paragraphs where they might have given volumes. After all, I entertain a conviction that, with respect to these hot cockles and likewise to leap - candle, we are merely on the threshold of the inquiry; there is more than Aubrey says, or than appears on the surface, pretty clearly; and the question stands at present much as if one had picked up by accident the husk of some lost substance. Speaking conjecturally, but with certain sidelights to encourage me, this seems a case of the insensible degradation of rite

into custom.

Wright furnishes an account of this sport, as practised both here and abroad, tending to shew that its character was modified, and possibly its original incidence forgotten, at a later period, unless there were different types. For the description and accompanying illustrations seem to go no farther than to portray a variety of blindman's buff or hoodman blind, while the one above given represents something infinitely less innocent, and is not even suggested by Mr. Wright. In the following passage from Stevenson's Twelve Moneths, 1661, under October, (which work, let us recollect, was originally a reissue of a 1626 book), a different recreation seems to be intended : "It is now not amisse

to play at hot-cockles hot, unlesse coals be the cheaper." Possibly it is the same as is described in the Vindication of Christmas, 1651, as harmless sport." Compare Nares, Gloss., 1859, in v. We have here probably the transition successively from a rite to what Nares makes of it, and to a meaningless nursery rhyme. But, again, Mr. Ditchfield (Old English Customs), 1896, p. 64, informs us independently that at the bakers' and confectioners' shops a Norwich on Shrove Tuesday they sell at small currant-loaf called a coquille, and that in the shop-windows a notice is set up, that "hot coquilles" are to be had at eight in the morning and four in the afternoon. This is survival with a difference, and another type of coquille, and the form is curious in connection with the Lowestoft largie.

House, Haunted.-Pliny tells us that houses were anciently hallowed against evil spirits with brimstone! Gay gives us a fine description of a haunted

house:

"Now there spreaden a rumour that everich night

The rooms ihaunted been by many a sprite,

The miller avoucheth, and all thereabout,

That they full oft hearen the hellish rout;

Some saine they hear the gingling of chains,

And some hath heard the Psautries straines,

At midnight some the headless horseimeet,

And some espien a corse in a white sheet,

And oother things, faye, elfin, and elfe, And shapes that fear createn to itself." Bourne has preserved the form of exorcising a haunted house, a truly tedious process for the expulsion of demons, who, it should seem, have not been easily ferreted out of their quarters, if one may judge of their unwillingness to depart by the prolixity of this removal-warrant. Antiq. Vulg., 1725, ch. ii.

House-Warming. This is to the present day a well-understood expression for the entertainment which it is usual to

give on removal to a new house, or establishment of a household. The phrase occurs in a letter from Fleetwood, Recorder of London, to Lord Burleigh, July 30, 1577: "Upon Tuesday we had little or no business, saving that the Shoemakers of London [the Cordwainers' Gild], having builded a faire and a newe Hall, made a royalle feast for theire friends, which

Conjuror," 1728, p. 58. "Immersion of wooden bowls in water, sinking incharmed and inchanted amulets under water, or burying them under a stone in а grave in a churchyard." I suppose the following species of divination must be considered as a vestige of the ancient hydromancy. An essayist introduces " a person surprising a lady and her company in close cabal over their coffee; the rest very intent upon one, who by her dress and intelligence he guessed was a tire-woman; to which she added the secret of divining by coffeegrounds: she was then in full inspiration, and with much solemnity observing the atoms round the cup: on one hand sat a widow, on the other a maiden lady, both attentive to the predictions to be given of

their future fate. The lady (his acquaint ance), tho' marryed, was no less earnest in contemplating her cup than the other two. They assured him that every cast of the cup is a picture of all one's life to come: and every transaction and circumstance is delineated with the exactest certainty." Gents. Mag., March, 1731. The same practice is noticed in the "Connoisseur," No. 56, where a girl is represented divining to find out of what rank her husband shall be: "I have seen him several times in coffee grounds with a sword by his side; and he was once at the bottom of a tea cup in a coach and six with two footmen behind."