490 Correspondence.
Scoring a Witch above the Breath.'
The following instance, about 1820, of "scoring a witch above her breath " to break her spells, was told to me in November, 191 1, by Mrs. F. M'Connel, of Blackyett, on the Kirtle, near Ecclefechan, now in her eighty-seventh year. She heard the story from the minister of Middlebie, who was son of the minister of Annan, and grandson of Mr. Monilaws, the minister in the story, — " three generations of parish ministers, gentlemen all of them, of the old school." " About a quarter of a mile from the parish church of Kirkpatrick Fleming there is the bridge of Bettermont over the river Kirtle; on the one side of the bridge is a mill, and on the other a cottage. In the cottage the old woman who was not thought canny lived. One night the minister of the parish, Mr. Monilaws, got a message in hot haste that something dreadful had happened at Bettermont. He and his son, a youth of age to go to college, went and found that the miller's pigs had all been drowned in the mill stream, and the miller believed the old woman had bewitched them. So he had disinfected her according to the habit of the time. He had slit the skin of her forehead across, and let it hang down over her eyes. Mr. Monilaws and his son sewed it up for her. Mr, Monilaws' grandson, a personal friend of mine, was my informant."
M. M. Banks.
Seventeenth Century Cures and Charms, {Supra, pp. 230-6.)
The following extracts from pages 16-31 of John Durant's
pamphlet of 1697 complete the account begun in the June number
of Folk-Lore, certain remedies and disorders being, as before,
omitted, and spelling, misprints, and punctuation exactly followed.
" For Ctiring Wens, Tumour, or Swelling, or any Rising in
the Flesh, or Warts.
Take hot Asmart, called also Peachzvort, Water Pepper, it hath
1 Cf. Ellis's Brand, Obsen'atiotis on the Pojutlar Antiquities of Great Britain (ed, 1855), vol, iii., p. 16, for an instance near Edinburgh in 1831.
