hree years had been employed by my
predecessor to take care of his poultry. At the time I came to make her
acquaintance she was a bedridden toothless crone, with chin and nose all
but meeting. She did not discourage in her neighbours the idea that she
knew more than people ought to know, and had more power than others had.
Many years before I knew her it happened one spring that the ducks,
which were a part of her charge, failed to lay eggs.... She at once took
it for granted that the ducks had been bewitched. This misbelief
involved very shocking consequences, for it necessitated the idea that
so diabolical an act could only be combated by diabolical cruelty. And
the most diabolical act of cruelty she could imagine was that of baking
alive in a hot oven one of the ducks. And that was what she did. The
sequence of thought in her mind was that the spell that had been laid on
the ducks was that of preternaturally wicked wilfulness; that this spell
could only be broken through intensity of suffering, in this case death
by burning; that the intensity of suffering would break the spell in the
one roasted to death; and that the spell broken in one would be
altogether broken, that is, in all the ducks.... Shocking, however, as
was this method of exorcising the ducks, there was nothing in it
original. Just about a hundred years before, everyone in the town and
neighbourhood of Ipswich had heard, and many had believed, that a witch
had been burnt to death in her own house at Ipswich by the process of
burning alive one of the sheep she had bewitched. It was curious, but it
was as convincing as curious, that the hands and feet of this witch were
the only parts of her that had not been incinerated. This, however, was
satisfactorily explained by the fact that the four feet of the sheep, by
which it had been suspended over the fire, had not been destroyed in the
flames that had consumed its body."[754] According to a slightly
different account of the same tragic incident, the last of the "Ipswitch
witches," one Grace Pett, "laid her hand heavily on a farmer's sheep,
who, in order to punish her, fastened one of the sheep in the ground and
burnt it, except the feet, which were under the earth. The next morning
Grace Pett was found burnt to a cinder, except her feet. Her fate is
recorded in the _Philosophical Transactions_ as a case of spontaneous
combustion."[755]

[In burning the bewitched animal you burn the witch herself.]

This la