Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/228

 1 90 Collectanea.

so that everyone should see. If you gave her anything or lent her anything, then she had got a hold over you."

Mrs. D had many more anecdotes about pigs which Mrs.

Smith had made ill. The complaint always took the form of whirling round and round. Many people had seen them in that state, and as soon as Mrs. Smith spoke to them they

recovered immediately. But in subsequent visits Mrs. D

refused to return to the subject, as she said it made her feel nervous at night. Another woman in the village afterwards told me nearly the same stories, and with reference to the marks coming out on the witch's hands, she declared she had seen them covered with cuts. She had herself, so she said, been an eye-witness of the scene, when a man she knew put a bottle on the fire and "said some words" over it, and directly the water began to simmer, old Mrs. Smith rushed to the door and made such a noise that they were obliged to speak to her.

Hermione L. F. Jennings.

King's Stanley Rectory, Gloucestershire.

Cutting a Waterspout.

{Conwmnicated through Mr. J. G. Frazer.)

The story which I give below was told me by a young Greek friend of mine, Andre Vagliano, a son of the Paris Vagliano. He was quite unaware of its real interest and merely regarded the whole thing as a " funny " incident. There is at least this advantage in his unsophisticated attitude that he cannot have read into the ceremony details which were not there ; though, of course, he may have failed to observe points which were. This is what he told me : —

" I was travelling to Cephalonia on board the Greek S.S.