Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/284

276 it was useless for him to tell them he had no such power, so, in order to ease their minds, he wrote certain passages in Latin with hieroglyphic signs, which they used as charms, and they paid him willingly, much more willingly than for rational medicine. There was another elder of the same church who had a cow which he thought was bewitched, because she had been in ill-health for a long time, and no one could tell for certain what the disease was. He returned home late one Sunday night and told his son he had consulted Mr. H. that night about the cow, and Mr. H. had written a charm on paper, which paper was to be given to the cow without delay in a pint of hot gruel. The charmed paper would drive the evil spirit of witchcraft out of the cow. The old man was too tired to prepare the gruel and give the charmed paper himself to the cow, as he had promised Mr. H., therefore he went to bed, and instructed his son to give the paper to the cow. His son prepared the gruel and gave it to the cow, but he retained the charmed paper and brought it to my father next morning, with a history as related above, and the history of the cow. The son had no belief in witchcraft, nor in Mr. H., but he dare not let his own father know that he disobeyed the instruction of Mr. H. My father gave me the charmed paper, and I know I had it with other documents of a similar character since my return from India in 1886, but I cannot find them now. It commenced with "Abracadabra" and signs of the Zodiac, then quoted verses from the Bible, Psalms, and the Prophets, and ended by charging the evil spirit to depart in the name of God, Jesus Christ, and the angel Gabriel, etc. That is, so far as I can recollect it.

In 1868 I was informed by the owner of a farm that he had pulled down an old cow-house, and built a new one some years previously. He happened to be there one day when the workmen found a small tin-box, much eaten and perforated by rust, in the wall of the old cow-house which they were then pulling down. My friend, the owner, opened the box and found in it a paper, a copy of which is given on opposite page. Both the box and the original document found in it are now in my possession. My friend asked his tenant whether he could explain how the box and paper got into the wall. The tenant said that many years before then his late father, a former tenant of that farm, lost several of his cows from some obscure disease which he believed was witchcraft. His father consulted Mr. H., and obtained from him a charmed paper in a tin-box which he was to hide in the wall of the cow-house to ward off all evil spirits and witchcraft, and it appeared to have answered the purpose well, for there was no recurrence of the obscure disease after that, nor any reason to suspect