There is a superstitious notion in some places that when the bride retires to rest on her wedding-night, her bridesmaids should lay her stockings across, as this act is supposed to guarantee her future prosperity in the marriage state. Another use to which the stocking has been put is its being hung up to receive presents at Christmas-time, a custom which, as Mr. Henderson points out, the Pilgrim Fathers carried to America, and bequeathed to their descendants.
It is curious to find even the garter an object of superstition, being employed by young women in their love divinations on Midsummer Eve, a period, it must be remembered, considered most propitious for such ceremonies. Their mode of procedure is this:--The maiden anxious to have a peep of her future husband must sleep in a county different from that in which she usually resides, and on going to bed must take care to knit the left garter about the right stocking, repeating the following incantation, and at every pause knitting a knot:--
"This knot I knit To know the thing I know not yet; That I may see The man that shall my husband be; How he goes, and what he wears, And what he does all days and years."
On retiring to rest the wished-for one will appear in her dreams, wearing the insignia of his trade or profession.
Again, as a popular object of superstition the shoe is unrivalled, and antiquaries are still undecided as to why our forefathers invested this matter-of-fact article of dress with such mysterious qualities, selecting it as the symbol of good fortune, one of the well-known uses in which it has been employed being the throwing of it for luck, constant allusions to which practice occur in our old writers. Thus, Beaumont and Fletcher, in _The Honest Man's Fortune_, refer to it:--
"Captain, your shoes are old; pray put 'em off, And let one fling 'em after us."
And Ben Jonson, in his _Masque of the Gipsies_, represents one of the gipsies as saying:--
"Hurle after an old shoe, I'll be merry what e'er I doe."
This custom, which was once so prevalent, has not yet died out, for in Norfolk, whenever servants are going after new situations, a shoe is thrown after them, with the wish that they may succeed in what they are going about. Some years ago, when vessels engaged in the Greenland whale fishery left Whitby, in Yorkshire, the wives and friends of the sailors threw old shoes at the ships as they passed the pier-head. Indeed, this practice is frequently observed in towns on the sea-coast, and a correspondent of _Notes and Queries_ informs us that one day, when at Swansea, he received a shoe on his shoulder which was intended for a young sailor leaving his home to embark upon a trading voyage. Tennyson has not omitted to speak of this piece of superstition:--