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with this painful disease. He hung a holed stone to the bed post, 

 and so long as it remained there he was comparatively well. But 

 his sister removed the stone, and his pains returned. 



The district is rich in names tracing the belief in fairies ; and 

 many old people I have come in contact with still believe in their 

 existence. One person who lives in the neighbourhood tells me 

 it was once his bad fortune just to miss the sight of one. When 

 he was a boy going to school at Mossband, a fairy happened to 

 be passing the school. There was a general rush to get a glimpse 

 of the creature ; and as he was too small to fight his way to the 

 front, it got past before he could see it. 



Fairies are things of the past ; but not so the witches. They 

 played no small part in the affairs of our immediate forefathers. 

 They were consulted and believed in so late as 1817. Their 

 favour was courted by almost everyone ; in fact, it was considered 

 dangerous to offend them. Just a story or two to illustrate the 

 remarkable powers supposed to be possessed by "Branton Lizzie." 

 On one occasion a bale of cloth was stolen from a cottage on the 

 side of the Lyne, near Breckonhill. Lizzie was consulted, and 

 probably the names of the suspected persons were mentioned to 

 her. On being asked who had committed the theft, she declared 

 she knew, but would not tell. She, however, said the cloth would 

 be returned within a certain time, and in the meantime the guilty 

 persons would be "witched." It was said that the cloth was 

 returned within the prescribed time, being put through a pane of 

 the window into the house ; and that — to use a rustic phrase — 

 some persons were "severely handled" in the interval between the 

 loss and the return of the cloth. A man who lived at Low 

 Hallburn is said to have got out of bed and to have run along the 

 ceiling and rafters of the house, to have set up unearthly cries, 

 and to have baffled the efforts of many men to keep him in bed. 

 Lizzie was applied to in the emergency. She told the applicants 

 they must go to a certain place, and there shoot a hare, and the 

 man would get better. They went to the place indicated, and a 

 hare rose up at the very place — but no, it could not be shot. It 

 was, in fact, a "witched hare." 



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