The Man on the Piebald Horse

The same list of superstitions of 1831 gives country cures for whooping cough. Some women passed the child three times before breakfast under a bramble that had rooted at both ends. Others went out on the road to find a man riding a piebald horse and asked him for a cure, which was then followed to the letter. One young mother was told to hold her finger down the child’s throat to the knuckle for twenty minutes by the church clock, and it never coughed again.