PREVENTING BY A SMALL GIFT A well-informed woman, an innkeeper, said that in cases where a person possessed of the Evil Eye admired anything belonging to another, no injury could follow if some little present were given to the suspected person on leaving. Another, the daughter of a farmer, an office-bearer in the Church, in the same island, gave the same information, but quoting an older authority. Beside her father’s house was a woman who firmly believed in the Evil Eye, and the power of preventing it by this gift. The house commanded a view of the road, so that, for the most part, an old woman suspected who lived in the neighbourhood could generally be seen approaching. The woman, to whom the latter was a special object of suspicion, never failed to advise our reciter’s people of the visitor’s advent. Her advice was invariably given earnestly and in the same form: “_A ghraidh thoir ni eigin dhi, cha’n eil odds cho beag no cho suarach a bhios e, ach thoir ni eigin dhi agus an sin cha’n urrainn i do chron a dheanamh_.” (“Dear, give her something, no odds how little or how trifling, but give her something, and then she cannot do you an injury.”) In the case of churning the small present naturally takes the form of a drink of milk to be given to any one suspected of the Evil Eye, and so a reciter said that one should always, for safety’s sake, give a visitor a drink of milk, and stated further that the beneficial effect was added to if the one who gives it first take a little of it herself before handing it to the stranger. As an illustrative incident the reciter told how Black Colin of Balinaby when out hunting happened to go to Balimony at the milking time. Not one of them offered him a drink of milk, “_Ach coma leat_” (But all the same) the following morning when the girls went to milk the cows not a drop of milk could they get, while the cows kept running and roaring as if they were mad. At once the man of Balimony, concluding that the mischief had been done by Black Colin, saddled a horse, rode to Balinaby and took all the milk from the Balinaby cows, transferring it to his own. When Colin saw this he wrote to Balimony to this effect: “_Leig leamsa agus leigidh mise leatsa_” (equivalent to “Let a be for let a be”). The reciter added that the milk was properly distributed thereafter, and that the incident was one of Black Art.