STOMACH DWELLERS.

Press, Volume LIII, Issue 9340, 14 February 1896, Page 6

STOMACH DWELLERS.

Rev. S. Baring Gould, in " Good Cheer."

Having, at one time, a small stuffed crocodile in my room, varnished and lodged on my mantel-shelf, I was visited by an old woman of the humblest class, about some parish pay that had been cut down by the hard-hearted guardians, w hen her eye rested on the crocodile, and after considering for some time, she broke forth with, " I reckon you got thickey [that] out o' somebody's insides." " Most assuredly not," I answered, considerably taken aback at the unexpected question. Then I added, " What in the name of Wonder makes you think so?" " Becos," she replied, " sure enough, there's one in mc, as worrits me—awful! And I wish your honnor 'd go to the Board of Gardjins and take thickey baste along wi' you and show it to them gardjins, and tell 'em I've got one just the same rampaging inside o' mc, and get 'em to give mc another loaf, and tack on a sixpence to my pay. I'd like to keep a pig, your honnor, only how can I, when I've got a baste like that in my vitals as consumes more nor half o' what I have to eat? There ain't no offals for a porker. Can't be, nohow.

A friend of mine, a gentleman of some education, and one I should have supposed superior to such crude notions, assured mc solemnly that he was acquainted with the following case : An old dame, in the Devonshire country parish, drank some water in which was the spawn of a triton. The stomach of the good lady proved to be an excellent hatching-place, and the spawn resolved into newt, which lived very comfortably in its snug if somewhat gloomy, abode. When the triton was hungry, it was wont to run about its prison, like a squirrel in its revolving cage, only, of course in this case, the cage did not revolve. Thie made the old woman so uneasy, that she wae hardly able to endure it. The triton evinced the utmost repugnance to the smell of fried fish, proximus ordet Ucalegon, and it was impossible for the old woman to remain in the house where fish was being prepared for the table, as the excitement and resentment of her tenant became intolerable. My informant assured mc that the old lady had applied to several doctors for relief, and had obtained none; at last she heard of a wise man, or herbalist at B , and she visited him. He recommended her to place herself under treatment by him, and to begin by starving her triton. The patient accordingly remained in the place for three days without tasting food, enduring all the while the utmost discomfort from the exacting and chafed newt. On the third day the uncertificated practitioner tied an earthworm to a thread and let it down the patient's throat. The triton rose to the bait, bit, and was whisked out of the woman's mouth. When she was sufficiently recovered, the herbalist showed her, in effect, a horrible monster, which he professed he had fished out of her inside. This creature was forthwith put in spirits and exhibited in a phial in the practitioner's window. There my informant had seen it—and the woman had told him her story.

The late Mr Frank Buckland had so often heard the assertion that frogs and toads lived inaide human beings, that he actually once tried the experiment on himself. He let a live frog hop down his throat. He felt no after inconvenience. He tells a story in his " Curiosities of Natural History " which he received from a Lancashire man, and which agrees in some particulars with that I had from Devonshire. "There lived a man whoso appetite was enormons. He was always eating, and yet could never get fat; he was the thinnest and most miserable of creatures to look at. He always declared that he had something alive in his stomach; and a kind friend, learned in doctoring, confirmed his opinion, and prescribed a most ingenious plan to dislodge the enemy, a big triton, who had taken up his qrarters in the man's stomach. He was ordered to eat nothiiig but salt food and,,to drink no water; and when he had continued this treatment as long as he could bear it, he was to go and lie down near a weir of the river, where the water was running over, ' with his mouth open.' The man did as he was told, and, open-mouthed and expectant, placed himself by the side of the weir. The lizard inside, tormented by the salt food, and parched for want of water, heard the sound of the running stream, and came scampering up the man's throat, and, jumping out of his month, ran down to the water to drink. The sudden appearance of the brute so terrified the weakened patient that he fainted away, still with hie mouth open. In the meantime the lizard had drunk his full, and was coming back to return down the man's throat into hie stomach; he had nearly succeeded in doing so when the patient awoke, and, seizing his enemy by the tail, killed him on the spot." And Frank Buckland remarks thereupon, "Iconaider this story to be one of the finest strings of impossibilities ever recorded." But such stories are told to this day, and believed in implicitly.