Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/90

82 , p. 199). In Bohemia the rope must have been cut from the bell-rope; with such a rope you can milk all the cows within sound of the bell (Grohmann, Aberglauben und Gebräuche aus Böhmen und Mähren, no. 965). In Germany the belief that witches can milk the neighbours' cows through a rope is universal (Wuttke, Der deutsche Volksaberglaube, § 216). Among the Wends also the same superstition exists (Veckenstedt, Wendische Sagen Mährchen und abergläubische Gebräuche, p. 283, seq.; Schulenburg, Wendische Volkssagen und Gebräuche aus dem Spreewald, p. 167). A broomstick will serve as well as a rope; you stick one end of the broomstick in the wall and work it like a pump-handle, and the milk flows from the other end into your pail (Kuhn und Schwartz, Norddeutsche Sagen Mährchen und Gebräuche, p. 24 seq.)

In India a witch is supposed to suck the blood of her enemy through a string. To do this she gets on the top of her victim's hut at midnight, and, making a hole in the roof, lets down a string through it till it touches his body. Putting the other end of the string in her mouth she sucks the blood out of the sleeper's body (Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, New Series, vol. vi. p. 278, seq.) This resembles the Australian mode of sucking a disease out of a man through a string; the patient holds one end of the string and the doctor sucks away at the other, spitting out the disease in the form of blood, which the patient believes has been drawn from his body, but which scoffers are apt to think comes from the gums of the medical practitioner (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xiv. p. 361; xvi. p. 39; G. F. Angas, Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, ii. p. 227; Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery in Central Australia, ii. p. 361).

But what of the feathers in the "Witches' Ladder"? Here again Australia may illustrate Somersetshire. In Australia it is the doctor's business to kill as well as to cure, and one of his modes of procedure is this. He takes something belonging to the person who is to be operated on, fastens it to the end of a throwing-stick, together with some eaglehawk feathers and some human or kangaroo fat. The throwing-stick is then stuck slanting in the ground before the fire, in such a position that