Page:Haiti- Her History and Her Detractors.djvu/398

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Haiti: Her History and Her Detractors

fairs. The following question was publicly asked the defendant: "Did you ever administer ’dragon's blood' for the purpose of making the Colonel love you more and other women less?"[1] Such a query would not have been made in a law-suit—in which it would be well to note that the litigants did not belong to the African race—if in some places in Nebraska, at any rate, people were not inclined to believe in the charm of "dragon's blood." Must we infer from this that all the inhabitants of Nebraska and the whole people of the United States in general share this superstition? Certainly not. Why then should all Haitians be charged with believing that the papa-loi's philters have really the power of exciting love or hatred?

At Leadville, Colorado, a judge "sitting in full orders at a session of his tribunal made bold to declare that testimony affirming the witchcraft of a young woman so charged before his honor was eminently admissible, since two-thirds of the population thereabouts believed in such things."[2] The case was of an exceedingly extraordinary character. One Martin Roberts had committed assault and battery on Catherine Rothenburg, a beautiful Jewess who was reputed a sorceress. No fewer than six different persons were on hand to display ills that she had practised upon them. Robert's defense was that "the Jewess had cast a spell over him, in pursuance of a threat she had made some weeks before, and caused him to fall ill as she had foretold she would do. He had become ill in a very queer way; his head buzzed and he saw things continually whirling before his eyes; he looked like a crazy man. Physicians could not account for the malady by any regular formula known to medical science and muttered something about it being very strange. He remembered then that Catherine Rothenburg had told him once that whenever she succeeded in afflicting any one with disease, as she often did, there was but one way to destroy her power over the invalid, that was for

  1. The Washington Post, March 1, 1905.
  2. The Washington Post, September 17, 1899.