WITCHCRAFT IN 1908.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LI, Issue 258, 24 October 1908, Page 3

WITCHCRAFT IN 1908.

That the belief 'v witches uild wi'. !• craft- is not yet qi.ite tiead in p.m> oi rural England was made strikingly ;ihrn the Zither ilay hv the hearing of an assault case in E*sex.

Cmionsly enough, that county has long shared with Norfolk and CamWidge the double distinction of briiv* 'the principal home of this weird supeiVstition. In that latter shire, the " witch's 'bottle" is still made by the village blacksmith. It is really a hollow iron bomb, hermetically sealed and filled with water instead of gunpowder or dynamite.

Its effect, however, when placed in a lire is much the same; the heat converts the water into steam, which, linding no Outlet, presently rends to pieces its met'al envelope with explosive violence. The 'fragments are, of course, scattered ill 'all directions, though more in some than in others, and, wherever they are most numerous, there or thereabouts lives the witch.

It was a Cambridgeshire farmer, too, that, a. little while back, earned fur himself a sentence of throe months' imprisonment by administering to a horse •that had the glanders—but which he believed to have been bewitched—a "witch's potion," the principal ingrelients of which appear to have been iron bails and bent pins. Suspected persons have even been put to death in England for alleged witchcraft Within comparatively recent years. 'At Castle Iledingham, Essex, for instance, in 1803, a poor old paralysed 'Frenchman was drowned as a wizard by] a mob of villagers. But by far the worst case of the kind happened in Ireland, where, s o recently as 18!l.j, a young married woman named 'Bridget Cleary was burnt alive by a Vrowil oi credulous peasants. She had been accused of witchcraft bv her husband, who stood by at her "execution,' a consenting party. He got twenty 'years penal servitude, and five others 'of those implicated also went to gaol 'lor lengthy periods.