Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/408

392 In a little cottage on a much-traveled thoroughfare one woman admitted to me with bated breath, as though not quite sure her tormentor was dead, that she had been bewitched. Her account was given in these words:

"I kep' seein' an old woman with a cow's hoof in her hand; sometimes she was by my side an' sometimes she was there on the wall. At last she come up close to me, an' she was goin' to clap the cow's hoof over my mouth, but I slapped at her right hard an' she went away. She ain't never come again. Yes, I know I was bewitched."

A cow's hoof is a frequent accessory, and animals that are brought into the magic circle are always of a domestic character, completely subservient to the power of the witch.

It is noticeable that the exercise of witchcraft is generally ascribed to women; and that of witch mastery, the superior attribute, to men.

The form of a judicial process found favor with the Puritan temperament in old Salem, although by a grim mockery the verdict was decided in advance. The independent mountaineer likes to take the law in his own hands, as the following story illustrates:

"A farmer believed a woman was bewitching his stock. He drew a picture of her and set it up as a target; then he sunk a piece of silver in his bullet with an awl, that being the charm for shooting a witch. He aimed to shoot the picture through the heart, but fired a little too low. On that very day the woman herself fell flat on the ground, and a deep, awful hole was found in her side. From that minute she suffered extreme agony, and died in a week."

The narrator had heard this grewsome tale from his grandmother, who said that she had seen the hole.

One of the oldest inhabitants of Monroe County is responsible for the ensuing chronicle; he dates it in the "forties" of the present century:

"'Tain't so very long ago there was a woman livin' near the Sweet Springs who used to be always seen with a cap and bonnet on; nobody ever saw her without the cap. She was a hard, grim-lookin' monster. If anybody was watchin' to see her ontie her cap strings, somehow they never could see any more until the clean cap was on—now that's so, there ain't any mistake about that! When she come over here from Botetourt County the report followed her that she lived pretty close to a man whose chillun went to school, an' a calf had been in the habit of attackin' 'em an' bitin' em. The father concealed himself one day and was watchin' to catch the calf. On that occasion it come out an' attacked the chillun on a