One would suppose the folly of putting horse-shoes into cream, "fish-skins
into coffee, to settle it," and forcing filthy molasses and water down the
throats of new-born babes, were amongst the follies of the past; but they
are not yet, with many other superstitious, and even cruel and dangerous
notions, done away with. For some prominent instances of this course of
proceedings the reader may consult next chapter.
Riding through the rural districts of almost any portion of the Union, one
will sometimes find the horse-shoe nailed over the stable, porch, or even
house front door, to keep away the witches. As in Gay's fable of "The Old
Woman and her Cats:"--
"Straws laid across my path retard,
The horse-shoes nailed each threshold guard,"
In Aubrey's time, he tells us that "most houses of the west end of London
have the horse-shoe at the threshold."
The nice little old gentleman who keeps the depot at Boylston Station is a
dry joker, in his way. Over each door of the station he has an old
horse-shoe nailed.
"What have you got these nailed up over the door for?" a stranger asks.
[Illustration: BOYLSTON STATION.]
"To keep away witches. I sleep here nights," solemnly replies the
station-master; and one must be familiar with that ever agreeable face to
detect the sly, enjoyable humor with which he is so often led to repeat
this assertion.
In numerous towns within more than half of the states,--I state from
personal inquiry,--there are at this day old women, who children, at
least, are taught to believe have the power of bewitching! My first
fright, when a little boy on my way to school, was from being told that an
old woman, whose house we were passing, was a witch.
These modern witches may not have arrived at the dignity of floating
through the air on a broomstick, or crossing the water in a cockle-shell,
as they were said to in ancient times; but the belief in their existence
at this enlightened period of the world is more disgraceful than in the
darker ages, and the frightening of children and the naturally
superstitious is far more reprehensible.
There is no such thing as a ghost. There are no witches.
"The Bible teaches that there were witches," has often been wrongly
asserted. That "choice young man and goodly," whose abilities his doting
parent over-estimated when he sent him out _in search of the three stray
asses_, and whose idleness prompted him to consult the seer Samuel, and by
whose indolence and procrastination the asses got home first, was a very
suitable personage to consult a "_woman of a familiar spirit_" (or any
other woman, save his own wife), from which arose the great modern
misnomer of the "_Witch of Endor_."
"To the Jewish writers, trained to seek counsel only of Jehovah (not even
from Christ), the 'Woman of Endor' was a dealer with spirits of evil. With
us, who have imbibed truth through a thousand channels made turbid by
prejudice and error, she is become a distorted being, allied to the hags
of a wild and fatal delusion. We confound her with the (fabled) witches of
Macbeth, the victims of Salem, and the modern Moll Pitchers.
"The Woman of Endor! That is a strange perversion of taste that would
represent her in hideous aspect. To me she seemeth all that is genial and
lovely in womanhood."
"Hearken thou unto the voice of thine handmaid, and let me set a morsel of
bread before thee, and eat, that thou mayest have strength when thou goest
on thy way."
Then she made and baked the bread, killed and cooked the meat,--all she
had in the house,--and Saul did eat, and his servants.
I see nought in this but an exhibition of rare domestic ability and
commendable hospitality; in the previous act (revelation), nothing more
than a manifestation of the power of mind over mind (possibly the power of
God, manifested through her mind?), wherein she divined the object of
Saul's visit, and, through the same channel, surmised who he was that
consulted her.
[Illustration: WEIGHING A WITCH BY BIBLE STANDARD.]
Witches are said to be "light weight." But a little above a hundred
years ago, a woman was accused in Wingrove, England, by another, of
"bewitching her spinning-wheel, so it would turn _neither the one way nor
the other_." To this she took oath, and the magistrate, with pomp and
dignity, "followed by a great concourse of people, took the woman to the
parish church, her husband also being present, and having stripped the
accused to her nether garment, put her into the great scales brought for
that purpose, with the Bible in the opposite balance, which was the lawful
test of a witch, when, to the no small astonishment and mortification of
her maligner, she actually outweighed the book, and was honorably
acquitted of the charge!"
Just imagine the picture. In an enlightened age, a Christian people, in
possession of the Bible, that gives no intimation of such things as
witches, stripping and weighing a female in public, to ascertain if she
really was heavier than a common Bible!
[Illustration]