Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/52

 44 it are very beautiful, and famed for the tropical plants that here grow out of doors. There is an anecdote related of one of the inhabitants of Tresco, who, when asked what they did for firewood in a spot where no trees grew, answered, "We kindle our fires from the loppings of our geranium hedges." Tresco, like St. Levan, at the Land's End, was in bygone days the favourite haunt of witches. A poor man there walking out at nightfall had the misfortune to meet with a party of them taking a moonlight ride on their broomsticks. A relation of his was one of the number, and she warned him, in a stentorian voice, that if he ever mentioned what he had accidentally seen, he should bear the marks of their wrath until his dying day. For a long time the secret weighed heavily upon him, and at last he could not refrain from telling his wife. The witches, in revenge, turned his black hair white in a single night.

The Rev. H. G. Whitfield, in his Legends of Scilly, gives some marvellous tales of the family of "Dick the Wicked." They were all hardened wreckers, who generations ago lived on this island, and who also had the gift of second sight. Dick himself, according to this writer, when ill and unrepentant, was, by Satanic agency, taken out of his bed and borne, wrapt in a long loose coat, which he was in the habit of wearing, some considerable distance from his house. Here his friends discovered him on the following morning.

On this island stands Cromwell's castle, built during his Protectorate. Old people thought that he in person visited it. The large china tankard, out of which he was said to have drunk his breakfastbeer, still exists. On a hill above are the ruins of Charles's castle. Scilly always remained loyal and true to this unfortunate monarch, and this verse of a ballad told me by a Scillonian was not written of one of them:

St. Warna, who presided over wrecks, was the patron saint of St. Agnes, another of the principal islands. She crossed over here from