CHAPTER IV

MANX FOLKLORE

Be it remembrid that one Manaman Mack Clere, a paynim, was the first inhabitour of the ysle of Man, who by his Necromancy kept the same, that when he was assaylid or invaded he wold rayse such mystes by land and sea that no man might well fynde owte the ysland, and he would make one of his men seeme to be in nombre a hundred.--The Landsdowne MSS.

The following paper exhausts no part of the subject: it simply embodies the substance of my notes of conversations which I have had with Manx men and Manx women, whose names, together with such other particulars as I could get, are in my possession. I have mostly avoided reading up the subject in printed books; but those who wish to see it exhaustively treated may be directed to Mr. Arthur W. Moore's book on The Folklore of the Isle of Man, to which may now be added Mr. C. Roeder's Contributions to the Folklore of the Isle of Man in the Lioar Manninagh for 1897, pp. 129-91.

For the student of folklore the Isle of Man is very fairly stocked with inhabitants of the imaginary order. She has her fairies and her giants, her mermen and brownies, her kelpies and water-bulls.

The water-bull or tarroo ushtey, as he is called in Manx, is a creature about which I have not been able to learn much, but he is described as a sort of bull disporting himself about the pools and swamps. For instance, I was told at the village of Andreas, in the flat country forming the northern end of the island, and known as the Ayre, that there used to be a tarroo ushtey between Andreas and the sea to the west: it was before the ground had been drained as it is now. And an octogenarian captain at Peel related to me how he had once when a boy heard a tarroo ushtey: the bellowings of the brute made the ground tremble, but otherwise the captain was unable to give me any very intelligible description. This bull is by no means of the same breed as the bull that comes out of the lakes of Wales to mix with the farmers' cattle, for there the result used to be great fertility among the stock, and an overflow of milk and dairy produce, but in the Isle of Man the tarroo ushtey only begets monsters and strangely formed beasts.

The kelpie, or, rather, what I take to be a kelpie, was called by my informants a glashtyn; and Kelly, in his Manx Dictionary, describes the object meant as 'a goblin, an imaginary animal which rises out of the water.' One or two of my informants confused the glashtyn with the Manx brownie. On the other hand, one of them was very definite in his belief that it had nothing human about it, but was a sort of grey colt, frequenting the banks of lakes at night, and never seen except at night.

Mermen and mermaids disport themselves on the coasts of Man, but I have to confess that I have made no careful inquiry into what is related about them; and my information about the giants of the island is equally scanty. To confess the truth, I do not recollect hearing of more than one giant, but that was a giant: I have seen the marks of his huge hands impressed on the top of two massive monoliths. They stand in a field at Balla Keeill Pherick, on the way down from the Sloc to Colby. I was told there were originally five of these stones standing in a circle, all of them marked in the same way by the same giant as he hurled them down there from where he stood, miles away on the top of the mountain called Cronk yn Irree Laa. Here I may mention that the Manx word for a giant is foawr, in which a vowel-flanked m has been spirited away, as shown by the modern Irish spelling, fomhor. This, in the plural in old Irish, appears as the name of the Fomori, so well known in Irish legend, which, however, does not always represent them as giants, but rather as monsters. I have been in the habit of explaining the word as meaning submarini; but no more are they invariably connected with the sea. So another etymology recommends itself, namely, one which comes from Dr. Whitley Stokes, and makes the mor in fomori to be of the same origin as the mare in the English nightmare, French cauchemar, German mahr, 'an elf,' and cognate words. I may mention that with the Fomori of mythic origin have doubtless been confounded and identified certain invaders of Ireland, especially the Dumnonians from the country between Galloway and the mouth of the Clyde, some of whom may be inferred to have coasted the north of Ireland and landed in the west, for example in Erris, the north-west of Mayo, called after them Irrus (or Erris) Domnann.

The Manx brownie is called the fenodyree, and he is described as a hairy and apparently clumsy fellow, who would, for instance, thrash a whole barnful of corn in a single night for the people to whom he felt well disposed; and once on a time he undertook to bring down for the farmer his wethers from Snaefell. When the fenodyree had safely put them in an outhouse, he said that he had some trouble with the little ram, as it had run three times round Snaefell that morning. The farmer did not quite understand him, but on going to look at the sheep, he found, to his infinite surprise, that the little ram was no other than a hare, which, poor creature, was dying of fright and fatigue. I need scarcely point out the similarity between this and the story of Peredur, who, as a boy, drove home two hinds with his mother's goats from the forest: he owned to having had some trouble with the goats that had so long run wild as to have lost their horns, a circumstance which had greatly impressed him [114]. To return to the fenodyree, I am not sure that there were more than one in Man--I have never heard him spoken of in the plural; but two localities at least are assigned to him, namely, a farm called Ballachrink, in Colby, in the south, and a farm called Lanjaghan, in the parish of Conchan, near Douglas. Much the same stories, however, appear to be current about him in the two places, and one of the most curious of them is that which relates how he left. The farmer so valued the services of the fenodyree, that one day he took it into his head to provide clothing for him. The fenodyree examined each article carefully, and expressed his idea of it, and specified the kind of disease it was calculated to produce. In a word, he found that the clothes would make head and foot sick, and he departed in disgust, saying to the farmer, 'Though this place is thine, the great glen of Rushen is not.' Glen Rushen is one of the most retired glens in the island, and it drains down through Glen Meay to the coast, some miles to the south of Peel. It is to Glen Rushen, then, that the fenodyree is supposed to be gone; but on visiting that valley in 1890 [115] in quest of Manx-speaking peasants, I could find nobody there who knew anything of him. I suspect that the spread of the English language even there has forced him to leave the island altogether. Lastly, with regard to the term fenodyree, I may mention that it is the word used in the Manx Bible of 1819 for satyr in Isaiah xxxiv. 14 [116], where we read in the English Bible as follows: 'The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow.' In the Vulgate the latter clause reads: et pilosus clamabit alter ad alterum. The term fenodyree has been explained by Cregeen in his Manx Dictionary to mean one who has hair for stockings or hose. That answers to the description of the hairy satyr, and seems fairly well to satisfy the phonetics of the case, the words from which he derives the compound being fynney [117], 'hair,' and oashyr, 'a stocking'; but as oashyr seems to come from the old Norse hosur, the plural of hosa, 'hose or stocking,' the term fenodyree cannot date before the coming of the Norsemen; and I am inclined to think the idea more Teutonic than Celtic. At any rate I need not point out to the English reader the counterparts of this hairy satyr in the hobgoblin 'Lob lie by the Fire,' and Milton's 'Lubber Fiend,' whom he describes as one that

Basks at the fire his hairy strength, And crop-full out of doors he flings, Ere the first cock his matin rings.

Lastly, I may mention that Mr. Roeder has a great deal to say about the fenodyree under the name of glashtyn; for it is difficult to draw any hard and fast line between the glashtyn and the fenodyree, or even the water-bull, so much alike do they seem to have been regarded. Mr. Roeder's items of folklore concerning the glashtyns (see the Lioar Manninagh, iii. 139) show that there were male and female glashtyns, and that the former were believed to have been too fond of the women at Ballachrink, until one evening some of the men, dressed as women, arranged to receive some youthful glashtyns. Whether the fenodyree is of Norse origin or not, the glashtyn is decidedly Celtic, as will be further shown in chapter vii. Here it will suffice to mention one or two related words which are recorded in Highland Gaelic, namely, glaistig, 'a she-goblin which assumes the form of a goat,' and glaisrig, 'a female fairy or a goblin, half human, half beast.'

The fairies claim our attention next, and as the only other fairies tolerably well known to me are those of Wales, I can only compare or contrast the Manx fairies with the Welsh ones. They are called in Manx, sleih beggey, or little people, and ferrishyn, from the English word fairies, as it would seem. Like the Welsh fairies, they kidnap babies; and I have heard it related how a woman in Dalby had a struggle with the fairies over her baby, which they were trying to drag out of the bed from her. Like Welsh fairies, also, they take possession of the hearth after the farmer and his family are gone to bed. A man in Dalby used to find them making a big fire in his kitchen: he would hear the crackling and burning of the fire when nobody else could have been there except the fairies and their friends. I said 'friends,' for they sometimes take a man with them, and allow him to eat with them at the expense of others. Thus, some men from the northern-most parish, Kirk Bride, went once on a time to Port Erin, in the south, to buy a supply of fish for the winter, and with them went a Kirk Michael man who had the reputation of being a persona grata to the fairies. Now one of the Port Erin men asked a man from the north who the Michael man might be: he was curious to know his name, as he had seen him once before, and on that occasion the Michael man was with the fairies at his house--the Port Erin man's house--helping himself to bread and cheese in company with the rest. As the fairies were regaling themselves in this instance on ordinary bread and cheese at a living Manxman's expense, the story may perhaps be regarded as not inconsistent with one mentioned by Cumming [118] to the following effect:--A man attracted one night as he was crossing the mountains, by fairy music, entered a fairy hall where a banquet was going on. He noticed among them several faces which he seemed to know, but no act of mutual recognition took place till he had some drink offered him, when one of those whom he seemed to know warned him not to taste of the drink if he had any wish to make his way home again. If he partook of it he would become like one of them. So he found an opportunity for spilling it on the ground and securing the cup; whereupon the hall and all its inmates instantaneously vanished. On this I may remark that it appears to have been a widely spread belief, that no one who had partaken of the food for spirits would be allowed to return to his former life, and some instances will be found mentioned by Professor Tylor in his Primitive Culture, ii. 50-2.

Like the Welsh fairies, the Manx ones take men away with them and detain them for years. Thus a Kirk Andreas man was absent from his people for four years, which he spent with the fairies. He could not tell how he returned, but it seemed as if, having been unconscious, he woke up at last in this world. The other world, however, in which he was for the four years was not far away, as he could see what his brothers and the rest of the family were doing every day, although they could not see him. To prove this, he mentioned to them how they were occupied on such and such a day, and, among other things, how they took their corn on a particular day to Ramsey. He reminded them also of their having heard a sudden sharp crack as they were passing by a thorn bush he named, and how they were so startled that one of them would have run back home. He asked them if they remembered that, and they said they did, only too well. He then explained to them the meaning of the noise, namely, that one of the fairies with whom he had been galloping the whole time was about to let fly an arrow at his brothers, but that as he was going to do this, he (the missing brother) raised a plate and intercepted the arrow: that was the sharp noise they had heard. Such was the account he had to give of his sojourn in Faery. This representation of the world of the fairies, as contained within the ordinary world of mortals, is very remarkable; but it is not a new idea, as we seem to detect it in the Irish story of the abduction of Conla Rúad [119]: the fairy who comes to fetch him tells him that the folk of Tethra, whom she represents, behold him every day as he takes part in the assemblies of his country and sits among his friends. The commoner way of putting it is simply to represent the fairies as invisible to mortals at will; and one kind of Welsh story relates how the mortal midwife accidentally touches her eyes, while dressing a fairy baby, with an ointment which makes the fairy world visible to her: see pp. 63, 213, above.

Like Welsh fairies, the Manx ones had, as the reader will have seen, horses to ride; they had also dogs, just as the Welsh ones had. This I learn from another story, to the effect that a fisherman, taking a fresh fish home, was pursued by a pack of fairy dogs, so that it was only with great trouble he reached his own door. Then he picked up a stone and threw it at the dogs, which at once disappeared; but he did not escape, as he was shot by the fairies, and so hurt that he lay ill for fully six months from that day. He would have been left alone by the fairies, I was told, if he had only taken care to put a pinch of salt in the fish's mouth before setting out, for the Manx fairies cannot stand salt or baptism. So children that have been baptized are, as in Wales, less liable to be kidnapped by these elves than those that have not. I scarcely need add that a twig of cuirn [120] or rowan is also as effective against fairies in Man as it is in Wales. Manx fairies seem to have been musical, like their kinsmen elsewhere; for I have heard of an Orrisdale man crossing the neighbouring mountains at night and hearing fairy music, which took his fancy so much that he listened, and tried to remember it. He had, however, to return, it is said, three times to the place before he could carry it away complete in his mind, which he succeeded in doing at last just as the day was breaking and the musicians disappearing. This air, I am told, is now known by the name of the Bollan Bane, or White Wort. As to certain Welsh airs similarly supposed to have been derived from the fairies, see pages 201-2 above.

So far I have pointed out next to nothing but similarities between Manx fairies and Welsh ones, and I find very little indicative of a difference. First, with regard to salt, I am unable to say anything in this direction, as I do not happen to know how Welsh fairies regard salt: it is not improbable that they eschew salt as well as baptism, especially as the Church of Rome has long associated salt with baptism. There is, however, one point, at least, of difference between the fairies of Man and of Wales: the latter are, so far as I can call to mind, never supposed to discharge arrows at men or women, or to handle a bow [121] at all, whereas Manx fairies are always ready to shoot. May we, therefore, provisionally regard this trait of the Manx fairies as derived from a Teutonic source? At any rate English and Scotch elves were supposed to shoot, and I am indebted to the kindness of my colleague, Professor Napier, for calling my attention to the Leechdoms of Early England [122] for cases in point.

Now that most of the imaginary inhabitants of Man and its coasts have been rapidly passed in review before the reader, I may say something of others whom I regard as semi-imaginary--real human beings to whom impossible attributes are ascribed: I mean chiefly the witches, or, as they are sometimes called in Manx English, butches [123]. That term I take to be a variant of the English word witch, produced under the influence of the verb bewitch, which was reduced in Manx English to a form butch, especially if one bear in mind the Cumbrian and Scottish pronunciation of these words, as wutch and bewutch. Now witches shift their form, and I have heard of one old witch changing herself into a pigeon; but that I am bound to regard as exceptional, the regular form into which Manx witches pass at their pleasure being that of the hare, and such a swift and thick skinned hare that no greyhound, except a black one without a single white hair, can catch it, and no shot, except a silver coin, penetrate its body. Both these peculiarities are also well known in Wales. I notice a difference, however, between Wales and Man with regard to the hare witches: in Wales only the women can become hares, and this property runs, so far as I know, in certain families. I have known many such, and my own nurse belonged to one of them, so that my mother was reckoned to be rather reckless in entrusting me to y Gota, or 'the Cutty One,' as she might run away at any moment, leaving her charge to take care of itself. But I have never heard of any man or boy of any such family turning himself into a hare, whereas in the Isle of Man the hare witches may belong, if I may say so, to either sex. I am not sure, however, that a man who turns himself into a hare would be called a wizard or witch; and I recollect hearing in the neighbourhood of Ramsey of a man nicknamed the gaaue mwaagh, that is to say, 'the hare smith,' the reason being that this particular smith now and then assumed the form of a hare. I am not quite sure that gaaue mwaagh is the name of a class, though I rather infer that it is. If so, it must be regarded as a survival of the magic skill associated with smiths in ancient Ireland, as evidenced, for instance, in St. Patrick's Hymn in the eleventh or twelfth century manuscript at Trinity College, Dublin, known as the Liber Hymnorum, in which we have a prayer--

Fri brichta ban ocus goband ocus druad.

Against the spells of women, of smiths and magicians [124].

The persons who had the power of turning themselves into hares were believed to be abroad and very active, together with the whole demon world, on the eve of May-day of the Old Style. And a middle-aged man from the parish of Andreas related to me how he came three or four times across a woman reputed to be a witch, carrying on her evil practices at the junction of cross-roads, or the meeting of three boundaries. This happened once very early on Old May morning, and afterwards he met her several times as he was returning home from visiting his sweetheart. He warned the witch that if he found her again he would kick her: that is what he tells me. Well, after a while he did surprise her again at work at four cross-roads, somewhere near Lezayre. She had a circle, he said, as large as that made by horses in threshing, swept clean around her. He kicked her and took away her besom, which he hid till the middle of the day. Then he made the farm boys fetch some dry gorse, and he put the witch's besom on the top of it. Thereupon fire was set to the gorse, and, wonderful to relate, the besom, as it burned, crackled and made reports like guns going off. In fact, the noise could be heard at Andreas Church--that is to say, miles away. The besom had on it 'seventeen sorts of knots,' he stated, and the woman herself ought to have been burned: in fact, he added that she did not long survive her besom. The man who related this to me is hale and strong, living now in the parish of Michael, and not in that of Andreas, where he was born.

There is a tradition at St. John's, which is overlooked by the mountain called Slieau Whallian, that witches used at one time to be punished by being set to roll down the steep side of the mountain in spiked barrels; but, short of putting them to death, there were various ways of rendering the machinations of witches innocuous, or of undoing the mischief done by them; for the charmers supply various means of meeting them triumphantly, and in case an animal is the victim, the burning of it always proves an effective means of bringing the offender to book: I shall have occasion to return to this under another heading. There is a belief that if you can draw blood, however little, from a witch, or one who has the evil eye, he loses his power of harming you; and I have been told that formerly this belief was sometimes acted upon. Thus, on leaving church, for instance, the man who fancied himself in danger from another would sidle up to him or walk by his side, and inflict on him a slight scratch, or some other trivial wound, which elicited blood; but this must have been a course always attended with more or less danger.

The persons able to undo the witches' work, and remove the malignant influence of the evil eye, are known in Manx English as charmers, and something must now be said of them. They have various ways of proceeding to their work. A lady of about thirty-five, living at Peel, related to me how, when she was a child suffering from a swelling in the neck, she had it charmed away by an old woman. This charmer brought with her no less than nine pieces of iron, consisting of bits of old pokers, old nails, and other odds and ends of the same metal, making in all nine pieces. After invoking the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, she began to rub the girl's neck with the old irons; nor was she satisfied with that, for she rubbed the doors, the walls, and the furniture likewise, with the metal. The result, I was assured, was highly satisfactory, as she has never been troubled with a swelling in the throat since that day. Sometimes a passage from the Bible is made use of in charming, as, for instance, in the case of bleeding. One of the verses then pronounced is Ezekiel xvi. 6, which runs thus:--'And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.' This was told me by a Laxey man, who is over seventy years of age. The methods of charming away warts are various. A woman from the neighbourhood of St. John's explained to me how a charmer told her to get rid of the warts on her hands. She was to take a string and make a knot on it for every wart she had, and then tie the string round her hand, or fingers--I forget which; and I think my informant, on her part, forgot to tell me a vital part of the formula, namely, that the string was to be destroyed. But however that may be, she assured me that the warts disappeared, and have never returned since. A lady at Andreas has a still simpler method of getting rid of warts. She rubs a snail on the warts, and then places the snail on one of the points of a blackthorn, and, in fact, leaves the snail to die, transfixed by the thorn; and as the snail dies the warts disappear. She has done this in the case of her niece with complete success, so far as the wart was concerned; but she had forgotten to notice whether the snail had also succumbed.

The lady who in this case applied the remedy cannot be in any sense called a charmer, however much one may insist on calling what she did a charm. In fact, the term charmer tends to be associated with a particular class of charm involving the use of herbs. Thus there used to be at one time a famous charmer living near Kirk Michael, to whom the fishermen were in the habit of resorting, and my informant told me that he had been deputed more than once by his fellow fishermen to go to him in consequence of their lack of success in the fishing. The charmer gave him a packet of herbs, cut small, with directions that they should be boiled, and the water mixed with some spirits--rum, I think--and partly drunk in the boat by the captain and the crew, and partly sprinkled over the boat and everything in it. The charmer clearly defined his position in the matter to my informant. 'I cannot,' he said, 'put the fish in your nets for you; but if there is any mischief in the way of your luck, I can remove that for you.' The fishermen themselves had, however, more exaggerated notions of the charmer's functions, for once on a time my informant spent on drink for his boon companions the money which he was to give the charmer, and then he collected herbs himself--it did not much matter what herbs--and took them to his captain, who, with the crew, went through the proper ritual, and made a most successful haul that night. In fact, the only source of discontent was the charmer's not having distributed the fish over two nights, instead of endangering their nets by an excessive haul all in one night. They regarded him as able to do almost anything he liked in the matter.

A lady at Andreas gave me an account of a celebrated charmer who lived between there and the coast. He worked on her husband's farm, but used to be frequently called away to be consulted. He usually cut up wormwood for the people who came to him, and if there was none to be had, he did not scruple to rob the garden of any small sprouts it contained of cabbage or the like. He would chop them small, and give directions about boiling them and drinking the water. He usually charged any one leaving him to speak to nobody on the way, lest he break the charm, and this mysteriousness was evidently an important element in his profession. But he was, nevertheless, a thriftless fellow, and when he went to Peel, and sent the crier round to announce his arrival, and received a good deal of money from the fishermen, he seldom so conducted himself as to bring much of his earnings home. He died miserably some seven or eight years ago at Ramsey, and left a widow in great poverty. As to the present day, the daughter of a charmer now dead is married to a man living in a village on the southern side of the island, and she appears to have inherited her father's reputation for charming, as the fishermen from all parts are said to flock to her for luck. Incidentally, I have heard in the south more than once of her being consulted in cases of sudden and dangerous illness, even after the best medical advice has been obtained: in fact, she seems to have a considerable practice.

In answer to my question, how the charmer who died at Ramsey used to give the sailors luck in the fishing, my informant at Andreas could not say, except that he gave them herbs as already described, and she thought also that he sold them wisps to place under their pillows. I gather that the charms were chiefly directed to the removal of supposed impediments to success in the fishing, rather than to any act of a more positive nature. So far as I have been able to ascertain, charming is hereditary, and they say that it descends from father to daughter, and then from daughter to son, and so on--a remarkable kind of descent, on which I should be glad to learn the opinion of anthropologists. One of the best Manx scholars in the island related to me how some fishermen once insisted on his doing the charmer for them because of his being of such and such a family, and how he made fools of them. It is my impression that the charming families are comparatively few in number, and this looks as if they descended from the family physicians or druids of one or two chieftains in ancient times. It is very likely a question which could be cleared up by a local man familiar with the island and all that tradition has to say on the subject of Manx pedigrees.

In the case of animals ailing, the herbs were also resorted to; and, if the beasts happened to be milch cows, the herbs had to be boiled in some of their milk. This was supposed to produce wonderful results, described as follows by a man living at a place on the way from Castletown up South Barrule:--A farmer in his parish had a cow that milked blood, as he described it, and this in consequence of a witch's ill-will. He went to the charmer, who gave him some herbs, which he was to boil in the ailing cow's milk, and the charmer charged him, whatever he did, not to quit the concoction while it was on the fire, in spite of any noises he might hear. The farmer went home and proceeded that night to boil the herbs as directed, but he suddenly heard a violent tapping at the door, a terrible lowing of the cattle in the cow-house, and stones coming down the 'chumley': the end of it was that he suddenly fled and sprang into bed to take shelter behind his wife. He went to the charmer again, and related to him what had happened: he was told that he must have more courage the next time, unless he wished his cow to die. He promised to do his best, and this time he stood his ground in spite of the noises and the creaking of the windows--until, in fact, a back window burst into pieces and bodily let a witch in, who craved his pardon, and promised nevermore to molest him or his. This all happened at the farm in question in the time of the present farmer's grandfather. The boiling of the charmer's herbs in milk always produces a great commotion and lowing among the cattle, and it invariably cures the ailing ones: this is firmly believed by respectable farmers whom I could name, in the north of the island in particular, and I am alluding to men whom one might consider fairly educated members of their class.

In the last mentioned instance not only is the requisite cure effected, but the witch who caused the mischief is brought on the spot. I have recently heard of a parallel to this in a belief which appears to be still prevalent in the Channel Islands, more especially Guernsey. The following incidents have been communicated to me by an ardent folklorist, who has friends in the islands:--

An old woman in Torteval became ill, and her two sons were told that if they tried one of the charms of divination, such as boiling certain weeds in a pot, the first person to come to the house would prove to be the one who had cast a spell over their mother. Accordingly they made their bouillederie, and who should come to the door but a poor, unoffending Breton onion seller, and as he was going away he was waylaid by the two sons, who beat him within an inch of his life. They were prosecuted and sentenced to terms of imprisonment; but the charming did not come out in the evidence, though it was generally known to have been the reason for the assault. This account was given my informant in 1898, and the incident appears to have happened not very long before. Another is related thus:--A certain family suffered from a plague of lice, which they regarded as the consequence of a spell. They accordingly made their boiling of herbs and looked for the first comer. He turned out to be a neighbour of theirs who wished to buy some turnip seeds. The family abused him roundly. He went away, but he was watched and caught by two of the sons of the house, who beat him cruelly. They, on being prosecuted, had to pay him £5 damages. This took place in the summer of 1898, in the narrator's own parish, in Guernsey. I have also another case of recent date, to the effect that a young woman, whose churning was so unsuccessful that the butter would not come, boiled herbs in the prescribed way. She awaited the first comer, and, being engaged, her intended husband was not unnaturally the first to arrive. She abused him so unsparingly that he broke off the engagement. These instances go far enough to raise the question why the boiling of herbs should be supposed to bring the culprit immediately on the spot, but they hardly go any further, namely, to help us to answer it.

Magic takes us back to a very primitive and loose manner of thinking; so the marvellously easy way in which it identifies any tie of association, however flimsy, with the insoluble bond of relationship which educated men and women regard as connecting cause and effect, renders even simpler means than I have described quite equal to the undoing of the evils resulting from the activity of the evil eye. Thus, let us suppose that a person endowed with the evil eye has just passed by the farmer's herd of cattle, and a calf has suddenly been seized with a serious illness, the farmer hurries after the man of the evil eye to get the dust from under his feet. If he objects, the farmer may, as has sometimes been actually done, throw him down by force, take off his shoes, and scrape off the dust adhering to their soles, and carry it back to throw over the calf. Even that is not always necessary, as it appears to be quite enough if he takes up dust where he of the evil eye has just trod the ground. There are innumerable cases on folk-record of both means proving entirely efficacious, and they remind one of a story related in the Itinerarium Kambriæ,