Note 66 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY
Reading edition
Nearly a hundred years later, a similar superstition survived in London, and is thus noted by Brand in his Popular Antiquities: “In the Morning Post, Monday, May 2nd, 1791, it was mentioned ‘that yesterday, being the first of May, according to annual and superstitious custom, a number of persons went into the fields and bathed their faces with the dew on the grass, under the idea that it would render them beautiful.’”