Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/206

 196 Collectanea.

the little man, and they parted, the farmer continuing his way home, as he thought. However, the next thing he knew was that he was by S. Peter's Church, more than four miles away from his home, and it was near midnight, and he was extraordinarily tired.

He could not remember anything after parting with Mess R ,

Fortunately there was a moon, or he might have found difficulty in discovering his whereabouts. He arrived at his house after I a.m., and found his wife very frightened over his absence. Of course there was only one possible explanation, the fisherman had bewitched the farmer, and the boys became more polite than ever.

A somewhat similar experience occurred not long ago to a man who also lives in S. Martin's. He was on his way one evening to a wedding party in S. Peterport, and met several people he knew ; he could never decide which of them had bewitched him, but he never reached his destination, and wandered about for hours till, as dawn was breaking, he "came to himself" on the Coast Road at Vazon.

I am indebted to the wife of a former churchwarden of S. Martin's for the three following stories :

A cousin of hers, when a little child, became very ill, and the doctor was unable to do anything for her ; she grew weaker and weaker, and at last could not take any nourishment at all. For some time her father had been convinced that she was be- witched, and was sure too that he knew who had done it, so when the child grew so much worse and the doctor gave no hope of a possible recovery, death in fact being only a matter of hours, he decided to seek out the "sorcier" and force him to remove the spell upon the child. The father took a long fork, and going to the Rope Walk, not far from the Rohais, he sought out the old rnan and told him that if he did not immediately remove the curse from the child he would kill him. At first the old man protested that he knew nothing about the child's illness, and was not re- sponsible for it, but as the father only got more indignant and would not believe him, he told him to go to a certain hedge and cut from a particular bush a piece of blackthorn about eight inches long. This blackthorn was to be placed on the child's pillow and left there, and the child would soon be well. The father did as he was told, and in a few hours the little girl took food, and in a