deserts, and forests the whole year round—except perhaps during the most severe winter months—gathering the healing or death-dealing plants and those required for various practices of witchcraft.
Such vegetable poisons as strychnine, conine, nicotine, atropine, or morphia, the poison of putrid meat (cadaverine, putrescine), the poison of special viper glands, spiders, frogs, the poisonous germs of tetanus and other bacteria, parasites of the sylvan plants or bogs—all these are known to the "viedunyas," the heirs of pagan lore.
The science of poisoning is kept a most profound secret, and handed over as a tradition from one witch to the other, usually her nursling and pupil. It often happens—sometimes it seems almost a necessity—that the witches are deaf and dumb, either from their birth or rendered so by the "viedunya," who either kidnaps a child somewhere, or obtains it from some poor illiterate peasant family for the horrible profession.
The poisoners employ besides for their practices human hair, powdered glass, or bovine or piscatory gall.
The poison is administered in food or drinks, or else a knife is poisoned, with which the victim is accidentally cut; or the victim is drugged in his sleep, the pillows having been sprinkled with venomous liquid, or the deadly plant is introduced into the pillows and acts through its vapours.
When, during the first Russian Revolution, I was
