iry shapes of false desire.

"And do the people actually believe all that?"

"Ay, do they!"

That is the boatman's version of Scott's theme in "Glenfinlas." Witches
played a great part in his narratives.

In the boatman's country there is a plain, and on the plain is a knoll,
about twice the height of a one-storeyed cottage, and pointed "like a
sugar-loaf." The old people remember, or have heard, that this mound was
not there when they were young. It swelled up suddenly out of the grave
of a witch who was buried there.

The witch was a great enemy of a shepherd. Every morning she would put
on the shape of a hare, and run before his dogs, and lead them away from
the sheep. He knew it was right to shoot at her with a crooked sixpence,
and he hit her on the hind leg, and the dogs were after her, and chased
the hare into the old woman's cottage. The shepherd ran after them, and
there he found them, tearing at the old woman; but the hare was twisted
round their necks, and she was crying, "Tighten, hare, tighten!" and it
was choking them. So he tore the hare off the dogs; and then the old
woman begged him to save her from them, and she promised never to plague
him again. "But if the old dog's teeth had been as sharp as the young
one's, she would have been a dead woman."

When this witch died she knew she could never lie in safety in her grave;
but there was a very safe churchyard in Aberdeenshire, a hundred and
fifty miles away, and if she could get into that she would be at rest.
And she rose out of her grave, and off she went, and the Devil after her,
on a black horse; but, praise to the swiftness of her feet, she won the
churchyard before him. Her first grave swelled up, oh, as high as that
green hillock!

Witches are still in active practice. There was an old woman very
miserly. She would alway be taking one of her neighbours' sheep from the
hills, and they stood it for long; they did not like to meddle with her.
At last it grew so bad that they brought her before the sheriff, and she
got eighteen months in prison. When she came out she was very angry, and
set about making an image of the woman whose sheep she had taken. When
the image was made she burned it and put the ashes in a burn. And it is
a very curious thing, but the woman she made it on fell into a decline,
and took to her bed.

The witch and her family went to America. They kept a little inn, in a
country place, and people who slept in i