Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/524

214 (14) A gentleman travelling with his servant found accommodation for himself, but his servant was obliged to find a poor shelter in the house of an old woman. With some difficulty, but luckily for himself, for the house was a poor one, and his bed was divided from the old woman's by the thinnest of partitions (the story goes that the partition was made of docks), the servant pretended sleep. While in this state he saw three women enter the house, and going to a kist take out mutches and put them on. Having so dressed themselves they swarmed up the "swee" for the pots and went out at the chimney hole. The lad followed their example and soon found himself up the chimney hole. But, unluckily, he forgot some magic words he had heard the witches use, and so he was unable to continue aloft, and he fell heavily to the ground. 2em

(To be continued.)

time ago a paragraph appeared in the English press reporting a case of Twin-murder which was said to have occurred amongst the Basutos of Cape Colony. The unfortunate victims of an ancient superstition were said to have been boiled in oil, and the persons responsible for their murder were in prison awaiting their trial for the offence. As it is not often that a twin-murder occurs so close to the frontiers of civilisation I was naturally anxious to know the result of the trial. The last case that I had followed in S. Africa was in Matabeleland, and I described it at the time as the judgment of the nineteenth century after Christ upon the nineteenth century before Christ: a very difficult situation for those who had to put law in execution without regard to equity, and who were not entitled to accept as a plea of mitigation the promise of the natives that, if the white men would undertake that no harm should come to them in discontinuing a practice which their fathers had taught them, they would abandon the custom. How could the