As a proof of this, we cite the following case which was heard only a few weeks ago at the East Dereham Petty Sessions:—
A young man named William Bulwer, of Etling-green, was charged with assaulting Christiana Martins, a young girl living near the Etling-green toll-bar.
The complainant said that Bulwer came to the toll-house, abused her with language of the foulest description, and struck her with a stick, without any provocation from her. Defendant, called upon to account for his conduct, told the magistrates that complainant’s mother, Mrs. Martins, was a witch, that she had charmed him so that he got no sleep from her for three nights.
He went on, “One night, at half-past eleven o’clock, I got up because I could not sleep, and went out and found a ‘walking toad’ under a clod that had been dug up with a three-pronged fork. That is why I could not rest; she put this toad there to charm me, and I got no rest night nor day till I found this ‘walking toad’ under the turf. I got the toad out and put it in a cloth, and took it upstairs and showed it to my mother, who threw it into the pit in the garden.”
The witness further informed the bench that the witch “went round this here ‘walking toad’ after she had buried it, and I could not sleep.”
Her daughter he believed to be as bad as the mother, and hence his natural indignation, loss of temper, and act of violence. Their worships appear to have been taken seriously aback by this extraordinary story.
The chairman asked the police superintendent if he knew the witness and could answer for his sanity. Superintendent Symonds answered that he could do so with perfect confidence.
Mr. Bulwer may be a thoroughly rational being in all other matters save witchcraft, and he even here is quite coherent from his own point of view and according to his lights. It was in grim earnestness of conviction that he denounced as “bad enough to do anything” the witch who had the wickedness “to go and put the walking toad in the hole, like that, for a man which never did nothing to her.”
We have no doubt, moreover, that the defendant expressed his sincere opinion when he declared that Miss Martins’ mother was “not fit to live,” because she “looks at lots of people, and she will do some one harm.”
Clearly Mr. Bulwer sees in Mrs. Martins a sorceress endowed with the awful gift of the evil eye, a baleful glance from which is potent enough to sour the milk or spoil the butter, to blight an infant from beauty and health into a puny changeling, and even to sow the seeds of slow decay in the robust frame of manhood.