afeard as they'd do summat at me." "Why, what could they do?" "Why, bewitch 'em to be sure. Our parson, he dunna believe in folks bewitchin' annybody. He towd me so hissen, a-going thro' Mr. Hyatt's cowpastur'. But there was Jack Rhodes the bank-ranger, he went to a witch in the Potteries about the mooney as he lost. He said, as soon as ever he saw Jack, 'You've come about that there money—there were so many with you—the amount was so much—you must not speak to anybody about it.' But he did, and towd everybody, and he never got the mooney back. But one night, when he was in bed with his fayther, the whole room was full of little red imps dancing all about. He said arter as the devil inna (isn't) black, but it couldna ha' bin the devil, it mun 'a bin some of his imps. However can them witches do such things? There was a young man as I knowd as wanted his moother to sell him a bit o' waste land as her cottage stood on close to Squire Morris's and s'he wouldna; so he brought one o' these ere men from Wolverhampton, and he give her a shilling, and arter that, when she was in bed at anight, something had used to come to her toe and creep up her till it got to her chest. She lapped her foot up with all manner o' things and put something with pins sticking out of it on her foot, but she never could get shut on it, and she had it to her dying day. Oh," he concluded, summing up the whole subject, "when I was in sarvice they'd used to bewitch the teams, but they darna do that now."
I would draw your attention in passing to the use of the word witch for a male soothsayer. This is customary in that part of the county.[1]
The witches who were applied to lived, you will notice, one at Wolverhampton and one in the Potteries. This indicates the form which superstition takes among the
- ↑ Compare Bunyan's use of the word: "Simon the Witch" (Pilg. Progress, pt. i.).—Ed.
