Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 2 1884.djvu/316

the pest). The bed is put back into its proper place, and the old lady is informed that it has been well beaten; but on going to rest she soon found a worse state of things than before, and she passed the whole night sitting up, like an eminent devotee, almost eaten up by the double set of fleas. "O, my dear!" said she to her daughter-in-law, "all night long I was bitten by those fleas; not a wink of sleep did I get for them." "Well," replied the other, "I gave your bed a good beating yesterday, more than once too." Then she muttered to herself, "O that some one would relieve me of waiting upon this disagreeable old thing!" Then the naughty daughter-in-law determined to set the son against his mother, so she began to spit and do other nasty things about the place, and scatter grey hairs all over the house. The husband, on seeing this, wanted to know who had been guilty of such filthy tricks. "It's your mother," said the wife; "you must make her stop this." Talking in this way she soon brought about a quarrel. "I can't live in the same house with such an old hag," said she to her man; "you must keep either her or me, for only one of us can stop here." After listening to his wife's version of the affair he decides that his mother is at fault, so he says to her, "Mother, I find that you are continually stirring up strife in this house; you must go away, and choose some other place you please to live in." She took him at his word and left the house in tears. Hiring herself to a family kindly disposed towards her, she barely managed to get a living. After the departure of the old woman the daughter-in-law found herself likely to become a mother, and she goes about telling her husband and gossips, "When that witch was here there were no signs of my having a child, now it is otherwise." In the course of time she gave birth to a son, and said to her husband, "While your mother was living with us here I had no child, but now I have one. You may indeed know by this that she was a witch and brought us ill luck." When the old woman heard that her daughter-in-law had borne a son, shortly after she was turned out of house and home, she thought, "Surely in this world justice is dead; for, if justice be not dead, she who beat and cast out the old mother would neither have a son nor be living in ease and comfort, so I'll offer to Justice the food due to its departed shades."