those who have neglected to make them." Werre is more merciful than Berchta, who, if her expected feast has not been prepared for her, after tearing open the bodies of those who have so offended her, sews them up again, with a ploughshare instead of a needle, and iron chains instead of thread.
From the interest which I took in this subject, it was only natural that when Notes and Queries was established I should seek to gain through its columns some illustration of it. Accordingly, in February, 1850, I inserted (1st S. i. p. 229) an inquiry as to the three interesting points in this remarkable night-spell. This was almost immediately answered, as to two of them, by my kind and accomplished friend the late Canon Rock (ibid. p. 281), with the ingenious suggestion that the "White Paternoster" may possibly be the "Witch's Paternoster," and he quoted in support of this suggestion a paragraph from Henry Parker's Compendiouse Treatyse or Dialogue of Dives and Pauper, 1536, from which I will quote only one short passage, which seemed to bear very strongly in favour of Dr. Rock's hypothesis.
"It hath oft been knowen that wytches with sayenge of their Paternoster and droppynge of the holy candell in a man's steppes that they hated, hath done his fete rotten off;" and he went on to suggest that St. Peter's soster should rather have been St. Peter's daughter, St. Petronilla, the St. Pernell of The Golden Legend, who, as he tells us, "came to be looked upon in this country as the symbol of bad health under all its forms. Now, if we suppose that the poet mistook and wrote 'soster' instead of 'doughter,' we immediately understand the drift of the latter part of the spell, which was, not only to drive away witchcraft, but guard all the folks in that house from sickness of every kind."
I am bound, in candour, to add that the learned Canon in a subsequent communication dissented from my view of "veray," and for reasons which will be seen in Notes and Queries (4th S. iii. p. 438) states, "to my mind therefore 'nightes verray' is only and simply another word for our present term 'night-mare.'"
But the information which my divers inquiries had failed to elicit was a year or two afterwards incidentally brought forward in answer
