said, "I think you are bewitched, and I will tell you what to do. Take a lump of salt, and put it into the fire at twelve o'clock at night, and if it gets hard you are ill-wished." Well, I did so, and sure enough it did get hard, and then I knew what was up. After that I got some pins, and threw them into the fire, and while I was burning them there was such a noise on the outside of my door that I was frightened. I did this for three nights, and after that a woman near me was taken ill, and I got better, and since then my wife has been cured in the same way—and after that you mustn't tell me there is no such thing as ill-wishing.'"
To pass on to Dorset. There the cottages have long been "a bye-word and a reproach." Much has been done, and still they remain more ruinous and contain worse accommodation than in any county the commissioner visited, excepting Shropshire. Several villages mentioned and described in the evidence are said to contain many cottages unfit for habitation. "I saw," the commissioner says, "whole rows of cottages abounding with nuisances of all kinds. Remonstrance is generally disregarded, and the state of filth in which many parishes are left calls aloud for active interference."
The Dorset cottage is usually built of mud, with a thatched roof. Many have only one bedroom; three is a luxury to which few can lay claim. Enter one: a more dreary place it would be difficult to imagine. There is no grate, but a huge open chimney, with a few bricks upon the hearth, on which the miserable inhabitants place their fuel—sometimes nothing but clods of peat, emitting wretched acrid vapours. Owing to the low open chimney, the house is constantly filled with smoke, rendering the ceilings, where they have them, black and dingy enough. Dr Aldridge stated at a meeting of the Farmers' Club at Dorchester, in January 1867, that "the cottages at Fordington were so bad that he ventured to say that they would not put their animals in such places^ and yet they were occupied by families of five or six individuals. In many of these cottages one could not stand upright, and the smoke, dirt, and filth together made a state of things not to be equalled in St Giles's."
Around these wretched hearths the poor family crowd on a winter's night, stretching out their chilled hands and feet to gather
