Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/411

Rh five pounds of butter to take home with me to burn in the fire to cap the climax and burn out the spell.'

"Then he want through his enchantments over the cow, and took the money and the butter home with him. One day when he had been drinking a little I asked him if he really burned all that butter. 'Divil a grain of it did I burn; I ate it with my pertaties.' It was on that same trip when Mosey was curin' the cow that a man who lived near by sent for him. 'I feel mighty quare, Mosey,' says he, 'an' I can't describe exactly how I do feel!' 'You're bewitched, sir,' says he, 'and badly bewitched!' (he always used those words). 'Faith, an' I'll try and cure ye! Have ye got any blue yarn about the house?' The man's wife went to look for some, and she came back with a hank of blue yarn. Mosey wound off enough of it to make a cord about the size of his finger; they twisted it together, he pretending to put some enchantments on it, and then he told the sick man to fasten it round his waist next to his skin. 'Don't you lose it on peril of your life,' says he, 'or you're a dead man!' 'Peggy, get a needle and sew it on me!' he says to his wife, an' she done it. He gradually got well—may be he'd a got well anyway. I can't vouch for that."

When asked if such things were still happening, the cane-seller replied:

"Not three weeks ago a woman thought her cow was bewitched because her butter wouldn't gather, and she het an old horseshoe hot and dropped it in the churn of milk. When she churned again the butter on that occasion gathered, and it was the same milk that was in the churn to burn the witch. You can put that down for June, '93."

The Potts Creek neighborhood is said to be a center for the witch superstition. It is also a favorite place for "bush meetings," to which the natives come from a distance in their wagons with picnic dinners of salt-risen corn pone and sliced bacon, and there they listen approvingly to fervid exhortations that are based on orthodox Baptist and Methodist doctrines. The West Virginia mountaineer is profoundly religious in temperament, and considers that he has scriptural ground for a belief in witchcraft.

has described how, by taking incidents from suitable story books, children aged respectively seven and a half, ten, and twelve and a half years were set to work to test the physical facts mentioned, and how, by the systematic use of the balance, measuring instruments, and simple apparatus, or even household utensils, a true spirit of scientific research was engendered. Evidence of the good effect was exhibited in the notebooks made by the children, which demonstrate clearly how well the juvenile investigators have mastered the scientific method of observation.