In Aubrey’s time, he tells us that “most houses of the west end of London have the horse-shoe at the threshold.”
The nice little old gentleman who keeps the depot at Boylston Station is a dry joker, in his way. Over each door of the station he has an old horse-shoe nailed.
“What have you got these nailed up over the door for?” a stranger asks.
BOYLSTON STATION.
“To keep away witches. I sleep here nights,” solemnly replies the station-master; and one must be familiar with that ever agreeable face to detect the sly, enjoyable humor with which he is so often led to repeat this assertion.
In numerous towns within more than half of the states,—I state from personal inquiry,—there are at this day old women, who children, at least, are taught to believe have the power of bewitching! My first fright, when a little boy on my way to school, was from being told that an old woman, whose house we were passing, was a witch.
These modern witches may not have arrived at the dignity of floating through the air on a broomstick, or crossing the water in a cockle-shell, as they were said to in ancient times; but the belief in their existence at this enlightened period of the world is more disgraceful than in the darker ages, and the frightening of children and the naturally superstitious is far more reprehensible.
There is no such thing as a ghost. There are no witches.
“The Bible teaches that there were witches,” has often been wrongly asserted. That “choice young man and goodly,” whose abilities his doting parent over-estimated when he sent him out in search of the three stray asses, and whose idleness prompted him to consult the seer Samuel, and by whose indolence and procrastination the asses got home first, was a very suitable personage to consult a “woman of a familiar spirit” (or any other woman, save his own wife), from which arose the great modern misnomer of the “Witch of Endor.”