Leaves from a Madeira Garden 



water is of course the best, but expensive — 

 should be hung above it. This will attract 

 any threatened danger of an occult kind, and 

 the animal will escape. Once upon a time a 

 mischievous young Englishman thought to 

 make sport of this time-honoured belief by 

 breaking many such bottles with an air-gun. 

 But the fact that the bottles were broken while 

 the pigs remained unharmed was, in their 

 owner's eyes, a powerful vindication of the 

 practice. And perhaps there was something in 

 it — in the absence of the bottle the naughty 

 boy might have been tempted to aim at the 



pig- 

 Pigs are, of course, peculiarly subject to/ 



malign influences.* For do not the evil spirits 



of bad men reside within them ? and that is why 



you will never give them any bread ; indeed, 



you must carefully remove all crusts from the 



pig tub. I have always felt that the lot of the 



Gadarene swine was a hard one ; it seems 



harder still that the curse should be extended 



to their distant cousins many times removed. 



But facts are stubborn things. 



* " Where hast thou been, sister ? " says the first witch in 

 "Macbeth." "Killing swine," replies the second. 



128 



