Page:Notes on the folk-lore of the northern counties of England and the borders.djvu/226

 204 used to bolt in when hard-pressed is still pointed out. A whin-stone on the roadside is also shown, melted down from her sitting on it. This witch used to show her spite by disabling the young horses that fed behind her cottage.

In Sir Walter Scott’s Demonology and Witchcraft (letter ix.) we find the disenchanting rhyme, by virtue of which disguised witches could recover their own shape, if only they gained time to repeat it:

It appears that in Orissa the witch transforms herself at will into a tiger; in Cumberland one is said to have been hunted in the form of a red-deer stag; but the hare is her most common disguise in the northern counties of Europe, and hence no doubt the wide-spread belief that it is unlucky for a hare to cross one’s path—a belief which dates at least from the Roman occupancy of our country, and which prevails, or has prevailed, in every part of Great Britain, as well as in many other countries. The Thugs in India are guided in their murderous expeditions by this omen. Lord Lindsay’s Arab attendants looked out for disasters after a hare had crossed their road in the desert. The Laplanders regard the creatures with terror, as do the Namaquas, a South African tribe. Thorpe’s Mythology contains many instances of witches disguised as hares; but there is one in which, by a strange caprice, the sorceress assumed the form of a toad. About the end of the sixteenth century, in West Flanders, a peasant had a quarrel with the landlady of the alehouse in which he had been drinking, and at last she uttered this threat: “For this thou shalt not reach home to-night, or I’ll never come back.” Accordingly, when he went down to the canal and got into his boat, he could not, with all his exertions, move it from the shore. In his distress, seeing some soldiers pass by, he asked them to come and help him. They did so, but all in vain, till one of