caused by witches, secure thriving practice in counteracting their influence. The Philadelphia "Times," on the authority of a reputable correspondent, who gives many facts to sustain his representations, says: "For generations the poor whites have believed in witches, and the belief is deep-seated and incurable."
The African population brought this belief from the Dark Continent, and it persists among them, though the progress of religion and education is doing something to check it.
I have recently noted more than fifty suits instituted in the United States by persons against those who they claimed had bewitched them; but under existing laws the accused could not be prosecuted except where money had been obtained under false pretenses, or overt acts of crime suggested or committed.
During pedestrian tours in New England, in various parts of the West, and in every Southern State, I have frequently stayed for the night at the houses of poor farmers, laborers, fishermen, and trappers. In such journeys I have invariably listened to the tales of the neighborhood, stimulating them by suggestion, and have found the belief in witchcraft cropping out in the oldest towns in New England, sometimes within the very shadow of the buildings where a learned ministry has existed from the settlement of the country, and public schools have furnished means of education to all classes. The horseshoes seen in nearly every county, and often in every township, upon the houses, suggested the old horseshoe beneath which Lord Nelson, who had long kept it nailed to the mast of the Victory, received his death-wound at Trafalgar.
In Canada the belief is more prevalent than in any part of the United States, except the interior of Pennsylvania and the South. In the French sections, exclusive of the educated,—a relatively small number,—
