nded together under the name of
_witches' herbs_, seemed to be but ministers of death. Such as were
found in her hands would have proved her, in their opinion, a poisoner
or a dealer in accursed charms. A blind crowd, all the more cruel for
its growing fears, might fell her with a shower of stones, or make her
undergo the trial by water--the _noyade_. Or even--most dreadful doom
of all!--they might drag her with a rope round her neck to the
churchyard, where a pious festival was held and the people edified by
seeing her thrown to the flames.

However, she runs the risk, and fetches home the dreadful plant. The
other woman comes back to her abode by night or morning, whenever she
is least afraid of being met. But a young shepherd, who saw her there,
told the village, "If you had seen her as I did, gliding among the
rubbish of the ruined hut, looking about her on all sides, muttering I
know not what! Oh, but she has frightened me very much! If she had
seen me, I was a lost man. She would have changed me into a lizard, a
toad, or a bat. She took a paltry herb--the paltriest I ever saw--of a
pale sickly yellow, with red and black marks, like the flames, as they
say, of hell. The horror of the thing is, that the whole stalk was
hairy like a man, with long, black, sticky hairs. She plucked it
roughly, with a grunt, and suddenly I saw her no more. She could not
have run away so quick; she must have flown. What a dreadful thing
that woman is! How dangerous to the whole country!"

Certainly the plant inspires dread. It is the henbane, a cruel and
dangerous poison, but a powerful emollient, a soft sedative poultice,
which melts, unbends, lulls to sleep the pain, often taking it quite
away.

Another of these poisons--the Belladonna, so called, undoubtedly, in
thankful acknowledgment, had great power in laying the convulsions
that sometimes supervened in childbirth, and added a new danger, a new
fear, to the danger and the fear of that most trying moment. A
motherly hand instilled the gentle poison, casting the mother herself
into a sleep, and smoothing the infant's passage, after the manner of
the modern chloroform, into the world.[45]

[45] Madame La Chapelle and M. Chaussier have renewed to good
purpose these practices of the older medicine. Pouchet,
_Solanees_.

Belladonna cures the dancing-fits while making you dance. A daring
homoeopathy this, which at first must frighten: it is _medicine
reversed_, contrar