RECENT RECRUDESCENCE OF SUPERSTITION. 81 



In August, 1893, at Montelepre, in Sicily, a girl of seventeen 

 suffered from a painful malady which her family and kinsmen 

 suspected of being the result of demoniacal possession. This 

 opinion was confirmed by the village strega or witch, who gave 

 them full information concerning the name, character, origin, and 

 power of the indwelling demon, and recommended the fifteenth 

 of the month, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, as 

 the fittest time for casting out the evil spirit. On the appointed 

 day the witch prepared a bath of boiling-hot water, into which 

 she threw snail shells, lobsters' claws, nettles, and similar ingre- 

 dients of a powerful hell-broth, recalling the contents of the cal- 

 dron over which the three weird sisters in Macbeth muttered 

 their potent charm. The patient was then put into the water and 

 covered with a bed blanket, under which a pound and a half of 

 burning incense was placed. The screams and struggles of the 

 unfortunate girl were of no avail, and not until she fainted away 

 was she taken out in a parboiled condition and laid on a bed, 

 where she soon afterward expired. As she was at the last gasp 

 the witch said, " Now the charm is beginning to work and the 

 demon is about to go out of her." 



It is not merely among ignorant and superstitious Sicilians 

 that such things are possible. Not many years ago a young 

 man at Urschiitz, near Rosenberg, in Upper Silesia, was treated 

 by a " wise woman " in precisely the same manner and with 

 equally fatal results. 



It was recently reported from Catania, in Sicily, that a fiddler 

 named Carmolo had killed twenty-four children and saturated 

 the earth with their blood as a means of finding hidden treasure. 

 A little later the bodies of twenty children were discovered in the 

 woods near the hamlets of Cibali and Santa Sofia ; at the same 

 time the parents received anonymous letters, in which the writer 

 told them not to grieve for the dead, since their blood would en- 

 able him to unearth an immense amount of money, which he 

 would share with them and thus amply compensate them for 

 their loss. 



In March, 1894, a farm laborer, Sier, was sentenced to four- 

 teen months' imprisonment for having exhumed the body of a 

 newly buried child in the graveyard at Moosbach, in Bavaria, 

 and taken out one of its eyes, which, he believed, would render 

 him invisible, like the tarn-helmet of the old German saga, and 

 thus make it possible for him to thieve with impunity. The 

 notion that a bridge will remain firm for all time if a living 

 human being is immured in its foundations is quite prevalent in 

 eastern Europe, and the gypsies are generally suspected of steal- 

 ing children and selling them for this purpose. Not long since, 

 when a bridge was to be built over the Save, near Breczka, in 



TOL. XLTIII. 6 



