Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/89

 A WITCHES' LADDER.

AN the "Witches' Ladder," or "Rope and Feathers," so fortunately discovered by Dr. Colles, be one of those ropes which witches are known to have used in many places for the purpose of drawing away the milk from the neighbours' cows? This suggestion I owe to a friend, who has kindly communicated an example of the practice. In Ayrshire, about the beginning of the century, a tenant came to his landlord to tell him, as a Justice of the Peace, that the neighbours were convinced that a Mrs. Young was a witch, and he wished him to proceed against the woman as such. Mrs. Young was said to have been seen riding on the rigging (the ridge) of the house, and to have a rope by pulling at which she drew the milk from her neighbour's cows into her own milk-pail. Napier (Folk-lore in the West of Scotland, p. 75) reports a case of a Highland boy in Glasgow who proposed to bring milk from the neighbours' cows by milking the tether. "The tether is the rope-halter, and by going through the form of milking this, repeating certain incantations, the magic transference was supposed capable of being effected." Sometimes in Scotland the rope had to be made of hairs taken from the tails of the cows whose milk was to be stolen; a knot was tied in the rope for each cow, and by pulling at the knots as if she were milking, and at the same time uttering a spell, the witch brought the milk into her pail (R. Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland, p. 329). The magic virtue of the rope seems in some cases to have been acquired or at least strengthened by the fact of its having been used to sweep the May-dew from the pasture-fields (Henderson,