he married
the lady you see, than she indirectly experienced misfortune through the
heavy monetary losses of her father. At last he became convinced that he
must be labouring under the influence of a curse, and, filled with a
curious desire to see if he had 'the evil eye,'--people of course said
he was mad--he went to Sicily. Arriving there, he had no sooner shown
himself among the superstitious peasants, than they made a sign with
their fingers to ward off evil, and in every possible way shunned him.
Convinced then that what he had suspected was true, namely, that he was
genuinely accursed, he went into a wood and shot himself."

This, I daresay, is only one of many suicides in similar circumstances,
and not a few of the suicides we attribute, with such obvious
inconsistency (thinking thereby to cover our ignorance), to "temporary
insanity," may be traceable to the influence of "the evil eye."

_Witches_

Though witches no longer wear conical hats and red cloaks and fly
through the air on broomsticks, and though their _modus operandi_ has
changed with their change of attire, I believe there are just as many
witches in the world to-day, perhaps even more, than in days gone by.
All women are witches who exert baleful influence over others--who wreck
the happiness of families by setting husbands against wives (or, what is
even more common, wives against husbands), parents against children, and
brothers against sisters; and, who steal whole fortunes by inveigling
into love, silly, weak-minded old men, or by captivating equally silly
and weak-willed women. Indeed, the latter is far from rare, and there
are instances of women having filled other women with the blindest
infatuation for them--an infatuation surpassing that of the most doting
lovers, and, without doubt, generated by undue influence, or, in other
words, by witchcraft. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that the orthodox
witch of the past was harmless compared with her present-day
representative. There is, however, one thing we may be thankful for, and
that is--that in the majority of cases the modern witch, despite her
disregard of the former properties of her calling, cannot hide her
danger signals. Her manners are soft and insinuating, but her eyes are
hard--hard with the steely hardness, which, granted certain conditions,
would not hesitate at murder. Her hands, too, are coarse--an
exaggeration of the business type of hand--the fingers short and
club-shape