Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/28

18 land tradition attaching to a Massachusetts witch named Blatchford. I obtained it, about thirty years ago, from a lady of eighty-four, who had heard the story from "old Mr. David Loring's wife", the victim of the spell. It is a small matter, but has not only the coincidence of name to excuse one for telling it, but also a certain relation of locality. Barnstable, where the thing happened, is named after the Devonshire Barnstaple. It was settled in 1639, and the spelling with b instead of p was a common method of writing the name of the Devonian town in the seventeenth century and is still a common local pronunciation. Some of the pioneers of the Old Colony town were Devon men. The Indian trail from Barnstable Harbor straight across Cape Cod is now a public highway, known as Mary Dunn's Road, from an Indian woman who once lived in a hut near a pond which the trail passes. The pond, too, is called after Mary Dunn. It is a pretty little sheet of water, lying quite solitary in the midst of the woods. One day, as Mrs. Loring reported, she was returning on horseback to Barnstable from the village of Hyannis, at the southern end of the trail, and, when she was nearing the pond, one Lizzie Blatchford, a witch, who lived on the margin, bewitched her horse, so that he insisted on going round and round the pond for a long time. To all intents and purposes, as we see, old Mrs. Loring was "pixey-led", and we have in her little anecdote a good instance of the connection between the fairies and witchcraft. Her remedy, if she had only known it, was to turn her cloak inside out and so reverse the spell. Bishop Corbet, best known to literature as the author of The Fairies' Farewell, had a similar adventure not far from 1620, and has left us a humorous account of it in his Iter Boreale. Corbet, not yet a bishop, was lost with his companions in Charley Forest, on the way from Newark to Bosworth.