The weaver insisted on taking the treasure, which consisted of three pieces of gold shaped like banana shoots. Soon after he fell ill, and the more medicine he took the worse he became, and, finally, as he lay dying, he called out that a bull was driving its horns into his side. Then his wife and all his children save one, a boy eight years old, died also. The boy used to say that some one was standing near watching the treasure, and he asked a neighbour to take it to his house. When he did so, he and all his family, except one man, died. Now the street is deserted, and though at the beginning people attributed the mortality to cholera, they now account for it by believing that it is due to the wrath of the spirit in charge of the treasure.
Charm against Witches and Evil Spirits.
(Folk-Lore, vol. xxxi., p. 75.)
The charm No. II., from the Common-place Book of William Sykes of Marsden, occurs in A Groatsworth of Wit for a Penny, or the Interpretation of Dreams, 12mo. n.d. (see Notices of Fugitive Tracts and Chap-books, by J. O. Halliwell, F.R.S. Percy Society, 1849). It is there given as follows:—"A night-spell to catch thieves. The following will drive away any evil spirit that haunts houses, or other places; and having it about you, no thief can harm you, but if he comes to rob a garden, orchard, or a house, he cannot go till the sun riseth: having in every four corners of the house this sentence written upon fine, true virgin parchment. 'Omnes Spiritus laudet Dominus Mosem habe. Prophetas exerget Deus, dissipari inter inimicos.' But if for a garden, or orchard, it must be placed at the four corners thereof; and if to keep one from being robbed on the road, to have it always about him, and fear God."
I have a charm containing a similar formula which I obtained between twenty and thirty years ago from an old farmer in Pendle Forest. This district obtained considerable notoriety in the seventeenth century in connection with the trial of
