Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/212

 202 child began to mend. I saw him the next day, and he certainly looked much more normal and had lost the blue tint and drawn expression he had had previously; and in a week he was well.

The father, who had not hitherto believed in witchcraft, was firmly convinced of it afterwards, and told me he would like to see the worker of the spell burned to death in the market place.

(C) It certainly seems proved that the power of possessing and of ridding of vermin both persons and places was possessed by various people in the island. I have met too many well authenticated cases, which have been vouched for by people, who, for obvious reasons, would not have wished to own that they had been the victims of such a degrading infliction, to personally doubt the fact.

(D) I have a photograph of the "crooked" house. It does not show much, but no single line in it is straight. The front curves round from the centre door; no single window is set in straight or is parallel with the other; the neighbouring trees are more gnarled and deformed than any I have ever seen elsewhere; and the poor little deformed inhabitants have queer little crooked faces as well as dwarfed misshapen bodies.

A Karaite writer, Judah Hadasi, who lived in Constantinople in the first half of the twelfth century, tells the following story very briefly in a polemical work composed, by him in the year 1148, called Eshkol Kakofer, printed in Gozolow (Eupatoria) in 1836.

When describing the various miraculous beings created by God he comes to the story of the Pitikos (the Greek name for the dwarfs and pigmies), and he says:

"In a certain country far away, near Kushand Hairlahby, a great lake where aromatic plants and trees are growing, there lives a people known as the Pitikos. Their height is only of