from the devil. It has often happened here (at Laeken) that sorceresses have been confined to their beds for a week or more from having been thus beaten.” One Dutch farmer, however, preferred actually administering the blows himself: so, observing one day an old witch go with a knife outside his dairy, turn to the moon, and repeat these words—
Here cut I a chip
In the dairy’s wall,
And another thereto,
So take I the milk from this cow,
he took a thick rope, ran up to the sorceress and beat her well, exclaiming:
Here strike I a stroke,
And another as I may,
And a third thereto,
So keep I the milk with the cow,
And this, it is quaintly said, was the best method he could adopt.[1]
In Motherwell’s preface to Henderson’s Proverbs is a narration which bears on this part of our subject. The author says, that the ancestor of one of his neighbours in a Scottish village, going out early with his gun one May-day or Beltane morning, found two carlines long suspected of witchcraft, but never yet caught in the fact, brushing the May-dew off the pasture-fields with a long hair tether. They fled at his approach, leaving behind them the instrument of their incantations, which he gathered up, carried home, and placed above the cow-house door. The consequence was that the next milking-time the dairy-maids could not find pails to hold the supply of milk which the cows yielded till the old gentleman took down and burnt the tether, after which things went on in the usual way. There were a number of knots in the rope, every one of which went off like a pistol-shot when it was burnt. Mr. Kelly tells of a hair rope too, which in the hands of a witch would yield milk, adding that it must be made from the
- ↑ Thorpe’s Mythology, vol. iii. p. 277.
