The same warning is given in Germany, and if it is disregarded, it is said that the child will be liable to stammer as it grows up. A curious Northumberland belief affirms that if the first parings of a child's nails are carefully buried under an ash-tree, it will turn out in after-life a capital singer. It is also a popular fancy in nursery folk-lore that the child's future career in this world can be easily augured from the little specks on its nails, a species of palmistry still extensively credited by even educated persons, and one, too, not confined to infancy. Again, the infant's tiny hands are not free from superstition, and here and there, throughout the country, there is a notion that for the first few months after its birth the right one should remain unwashed, the reason assigned for this strange piece of eccentricity being that it may gather riches. According to another idea, children born open-handed are said to be of a bountiful disposition. In Scotland, too, great attention is paid as to which hand a child uses when taking up for the first time a spoon to eat. If it should happen to be the left, then, alas! he is doomed to be an unlucky fellow all through his life. Indeed, as far as we can judge from the numerous items of folk-lore still in vogue, it would seem that the early period of infancy, in one way or another, furnishes countless opportunities for ascertaining what kind of life is in store for the child in years to come, almost every trivial action being regarded as indicative of something or other that shall befall it. Although many of these ideas may seem to us in this nineteenth century apparently senseless, yet it must be remembered they are frequently survivals of primitive culture, and are interesting as having been handed down to us from the distant past. According to an old superstition, parents desirous of securing long life for their children should pass them through the branches of a maple. A few years ago one of these trees had long been resorted to for this purpose in West Grinstead Park, and as soon as a rumour spread through the parish that it was about to be demolished, quite a consternation prevailed in the neighbourhood. Similar properties are supposed to belong to the ash, weakly infants that do not thrive being drawn through a cleft in its trunk. This charm, as performed in Cornwall, is thus:--A large knife is inserted into the trunk of a young ash, about a foot from the ground, and a vertical opening made for about three feet. Two men then forcibly pull the parts asunder, and hold them so, whilst the mother passes the child through the cleft three times. The ceremony does not end here, as the child has to be washed for three successive mornings in the dew from the leaves of the "charmed ash." This supposed magical property of the ash has an additional interest, when we consider that some thousands of years ago our ancestors regarded it as one of their wonder-working trees, and associated it with some of their oldest traditions. At the present day, too, it is the subject of an extensive folk-lore, to which we shall have occasion to refer in a succeeding chapter.