was just a little over, so I was forced to leave that in the paper bag.  Well, that day a neighbour came in from over the hill.  I knew fine she was a witch; so we sat and gossiped a bit; she was a real pleasant woman, and she sat and sat, and the time of day went by.  So I made her a cup of tea, her and me; but I used the drawing that was in the paper bag.  Said she, “I just dropped in to borrow a bit of tea going home, but if that’s all ye have”—­Oh, but I could see her eyeing round; so I was too sharp for her, and I says, “Well, I’ve no more in the paper just now, but if ye’ll wait till Donald comes, maybe he’ll bring some.”  So she saw I was too sharp for her, and away she went.  If I’d as much as opened the tin, she’d have had every grain of good out of it with her eyes.’

At first the student had had the grave and righteous intention of denouncing the superstition, but gradually he had perceived that to do so would be futile.  The artistic soul of him was caught by the curious recital.  He remembered now the bidding of Mary Torrance, and thought with pleasure that he would go back and repeat these strange stories to Miss Torrance, and smile at them in her company.

‘Now, for instance,’ he said aloud, ’if a good cow, that is a great pet in the family, should suddenly cease to give her milk, how would you set about curing her?’

The dame’s small bright eyes grew keener.  She moved to her spinning-wheel and gave it a turn.  ‘Ay,’ she said, ’and whose is the cow?’

He was not without a genuine curiosity.  ’What would you do for any cow in that case?’

‘And is it Torrance’s cow?’ asked Mistress Betty.  ’Och, but I know it’s Torrance’s cow that ye’re speiring for.’

The young minister was recalled to a sense of his duty.  He rose up with brisk dignity.  ’I only asked you to see what you would say.  I do not believe the stories you have been telling me.’

She nodded her head, taking his assertion as a matter of course.  ’But I’ll tell you exactly what they must do,’ she said.  ’Ye can tell Miss Torrance she must get a pound of pins.’

‘A pound of pins!’ said he.

’Ay, it’s a large quantity, but they’ll have them at the store, for it’s more than sometimes they’re wanted—­a time here, a time there—­against the witches.  And she’s to boil them in whatever milk the cow gives, and she’s to pour them boiling hot into a hole in the ground; and when she’s put the earth over them, and the sod over that, she’s to tether the animal there, and milk it there, and the milk will come right enough.’

While the student was making his way home along the hillside, through field and forest, the long arm of the sea turned to red and gold in the light of the clouds which the sun had left behind when it sank down over the distant region that the Cape Breton folk call Canada.

The minister meditated upon what he had heard, but not for long.  He could not bring his mind into such attitude towards the witch-tales as to conceive of belief in them as an actual part of normal human experience.  Insanity, or the love of making a good story out of notions which have never been seriously entertained, must compose the warp and woof of the fabric of such strange imaginings.  It is thus we account for most experiences we do not understand.