Wilton, Mary Margaret Stanley Egerton; Wilton, Mary Margaret Stanley Egerton [Hrsg.]: The art of needle-work from the earliest ages: including some notices of the ancient historical tapestries (London: Henry Colburn Publishers, 1841)

76 NEEDLEWORK OF THE DARK AGES.

quite exploded. There are some lingering remnants
of a superstitious regard for them which may have
had their origin in these very times and circum-
stances. For how surely, where they are rigidly
traced, are our country customs, our vulgar cere-
monies, our apparently absurd and senseless usages,
found to emanate from some principle or super-
stition of general and prevailing adoption. In some
counties we cannot enter a farm-house where the
mantel-piece in the parlour is not decorated with a
diadem of peacock feathers, which are carefully
dusted and preserved. And in houses of more as-
suming pretensions the same custom frequently
prevails; and we knew a lady who carefully pre-
served some peacock feathers in a drawer long after
her association with people in a higher station than
that to which she originally belonged had made her
ashamed to display them in her parlour. This could
not be for mere ornament: there is some idea of luck
attached to them, which seems not improbably to
have arisen from circumstances connected originally
with the “ Vow of the Peacock.” At any rate, the
religious care with which peacocks’ feathers are pre-
served by many who care not for them as ornaments,
is not a whit more ridiculous than to see people
gravely turn over the money in their pockets when
they first hear the cuckoo, or joyfully fasten a
dropped horse-shoe on their threshold, or shudder-
ingly turn aside if two straws lie across in their
path, or thankfully seize an old shoe accidentally
met with, heedless of the probable state of the beg-
gared foot that may unconsciously have left it there,
or any other of the million unaccountable customs