circumstances of the case; the women certainly wore black, but then, the rule of attending the funerals even of mere acquaintances, causes the best dress in Switzerland to be always one suggestive of mourning. It seemed that the pathos of the dedication of a dawning life to the Supreme Good was sufficient to touch the hearts of these simple folk, starved from coarser emotion. In Calabria it is thought unlucky to be either born or christened on a Friday. Saturday is likewise esteemed an inauspicious day, which points to its association with the witches' Sabbath, once the subject of numerous superstitious beliefs throughout the southern provinces of Italy. Not far from the battlefield near Benevento where Charles of Anjou defeated Manfred, grew a walnut tree, which had an almost European fame as the scene of Sabbatical orgies. People used to hang upon its branches the figure of a two-headed viper coiled into a ring, a symbol of incalculable antiquity. St Barbatus had the tree cut down, but the devil raised new shoots from the root and so it was renewed. Shreds of snake-worship may be still collected. The Calabrians hold that the cast-off skin of a snake is an excellent thing to put under the pillow of a sick baby. Even after their christening, children are unfortunately most susceptible to enchantment. When a beautiful and healthy child sickens and dies, the Irish peasant infers that the genuine baby has been stolen by fairies, and this miserable sprite left in its place. Two ancient antidotes have great power to counteract the effect of spells. One is the purifying Fire. In Scotland, as in Italy, bewitched children, within the memory of living men, have been set to rights by contact with its salutary heat. My relative, Count Belli of Viterbo, was "looked at" when an infant by a _Jettatrice_, and was in consequence put by his nurse into a mild oven for half-an-hour. One would think that the remedy was nearly as perilous as the practice of the lake-dwellers of cutting a little hole in their children's heads to let out the evil spirits, but in the case mentioned it seems to have answered well.