Page:A book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall.djvu/147

Rh went to witness them, and came away convinced that they were the work of spirits; especially was it so with one yeoman, whose hat was knocked off his head by the spirit. My father investigated the matter, and came to the conclusion that the whole was contrived by a girl of low intelligence but of much cunning. It is now, with the advance of education, persons of a superior grade who are the dupes of spirit-mediums. Education will not give brains, but it will varnish emptiness.

At Tiverton lived, till a few years ago, "Old Snow," a rather famous "white witch," to whom many persons had recourse, among others a farmer who was a churchwarden and a well-to-do man. I knew him well, and in 1889 believed him to be a doomed man, with a hacking cough, worn to a shred, and bent by weakness. Having consulted all the prominent doctors in the south of the county, he went in desperation to "Old Snow." What the white witch did to him I cannot say, but I can testify he was a changed man from that day, and is at present a robust, hale man, looking good for another twenty or thirty years.

In an article I wrote on "White Witches" for the Daily Graphic I mentioned this case. Some days after I met the farmer. "Why," said he, "you have put me in the papers." "So I have," I answered, "but what I told was literally true." "True—aye," he said, "every bit. Old Snow cured me when the faculty gave me up. How he did it, neither you nor I know."

The white witch is an institution that has not been