"You remember how we met her in the fields last Feast-night of the Three Kings?" asked a youth looking up from plucking the feathers out from a living, struggling, moaning goose. "Coming singing through the fog like nothing earthly; and a moment later a torch caught little Jocelin's curls and burnt him till he was so hideous that his mother could scarce have known him. You remember?"
"Surely we remember," they cried in a hearty chorus round the broken almond-tree. "Was there not the good old Dax this very winter, killed by her if ever any creature were killed by foul means, though the law would never listen to the Flandrins when they said so?"
"And little Bernardou," added one who had not hitherto spoken. "Little Bernardou died a month after his grandam, in hospital. She had cast her eye on him, and the poor little lad never rallied."
"A jettatrice ever brings misfortune," muttered the old soldier of Napoleon, washing his last lettuce and lighting a fresh pipe.
"Or does worse," muttered the mother of the crippled child. "She is not for nothing the devil's daughter, mark you."
"Nay, indeed," said an old woman, knitting from a ball of wool with which a kitten played among the strewn cabbage-leaves and the crushed sweet-smelling thyme. "Nay, was it not only this very winter that my son's little youngest boy threw a stone at her, just for luck, as she went by in her boat through the town; and it struck her and drew blood from her shoulder; and that self-same night a piece of the oaken carvings in the ceiling gave way and dropped upon the little angel as he slept, and broke his arm above the elbow:—she is a witch; there is no question but she is a witch."
"If I were sure so, I would think it well to kill her," murmured the youth, as he stifled the struggling bird between his knees.
"My sister met her going through the standing corn last harvest-time, and the child she brought forth a week after was born blind, and is blind now," said a hard-visaged woman, washing turnips in a basin of water.
"I was black-and-blue for a month when she threw me down, and took from me that hawk I had trapped, and went and fastened my wrist in the iron instead!" hissed a boy of twelve, in a shrill piping treble, as he slit the tongue of a quivering starling.
"They say she dances naked, by moonlight, in the water with imps," cried a bright little lad who was at play with the kitten.