healed. But not for long, for two or three years later he fell ill again and died.
This example will serve as a proof of the last point on which we touched, namely, that a witch’s cure is sometimes only temporary, and also is conditional upon the ailment being transferred to another creature.
I shall here set down one more example to show that when witches wish to heal a person they often cast the spell upon a beast. I know a man who, at the age of ten or twelve, became as it were frenzied. It was at once believed that he had been bewitched by a man who was suspected because he had threatened the father that he would harm him in that which he loved best. One day it happened that the father’s husbandman was passing with a hen in his hands before the house of the suspected man, who asked him where he was going. The husbandman answered that he was going to see his master’s son, who was sick; and the other replied that he was very sorry for it, but that he had the means of healing him, and told the husbandman that, on arriving at his master’s house, he must put the hen he was carrying on the ground, and that if the boy killed it he would be cured; but that they were to take great care not to eat this hen. When the husbandman reached his master’s house he did as he had been told, and put the hen on the ground. The hen went straight up to the sick boy, who took it by the neck and killed it, and was immediately cured. Who, then, can doubt that the spell was cast upon this hen?
