CHAPTER XIV. QUACKS AND IMPOSTORS.

seventh son is believed to possess prophetical as well as healing power. A few years ago a Dublin shopkeeper finding his errand-boy to be generally very dilatory in his duties, inquired into the cause, and found that the boy, being the seventh son of a seventh son, his services were often in requisition among the poorer neighbours, in a way that brought in a good many pieces of silver. Early in the present century there was a man in Hampshire, the seventh son of a seventh son, who was consulted by the villagers as a doctor, and who carried about with him a collection of crutches and sticks, purporting to have once belonged to persons whom he had cured of lameness. Cases are not wanting, also, in which the seventh daughter is placed upon a similar pinnacle of greatness. In Scotland the spaewife or fortune-teller frequently announces herself as the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, to enhance her claims to prophetic power. Even so late as 1851, an inscription was seen on a window in Plymouth, denoting that a certain doctress was the third seventh daughter!—which the world was probably intended to interpret as the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. . . . . France, as well as our own country, has a belief in the seventh-son mystery. The Journal de Loiret, a French provincial newspaper, in 1854 stated that, in Orleans, if a family has seven sons and no daughter, the seventh is called a Marcou, is branded with a fleur-de-lis, and is believed to possess the power of curing the king’s evil. The Marcou breathes on the part affected, or else the patient touches the Marcou’s fleur-de-lis. In the year above named there was a famous Marcou in Orleans named Foulon; he was a cooper by trade, and was known as ‘le beau Marcou.’ Simple peasants used to come to visit him from many leagues in all directions, particularly in Passion-week, when his ministrations were believed to be most efficacious. On the night of Good Friday, from midnight to sunrise, the chance of cure was supposed to be especially good, and on this account four or five hundred persons would assemble. Great disturbances hence arose; and as there was evidence, to all except the silly dupes themselves, that Foulon made use of their