Among the singular traits of character which are developed amid these, whom I may designate in the German phrase as my mossy[139] parishioners, there is one which I should define, in their extreme simplicity, as exuberant belief, or rather faith in excess. I do not, however, intend by this term any kind of religious peculiarity of tenet or creed, but only a prostration of the intellect before certain old traditionary and inherited impulses of the human mind. They share and they embrace those instinctive tendencies of their Celtic nature which in all ages have led their race to cherish a credence in the existence and power of witches, fairies, and the force of charms and spells. It is well known that all such supernatural influences on ordinary life are singularly congenial to the ancient and the modern Cornish mind. I do not exaggerate when I affirm at all events my own persuasion, that two-thirds of the total inhabitants of Tamar-side implicitly believe in the power of the _Mal Occhio_, as the Italians name it, or the Evil Eye. Is this incredible in a day when the spasms and raps and bad spelling of a familiar spirit are received with acquiescent belief in polished communities, and even in intellectual London? The old notion that a wizard or a witch so became by a nefarious bargain with the enemy of man, and by a surrender of his soul to his ultimate grasp, although still held in many a nook of our western valleys, and by the crooning dame at her solitary hearth, appears to have been exchanged in my hamlet of Holacombe (for such is its name) for a persuasion that these choosers of the slain inherit their faculty from their birth. Whispers of forbidden ties between their parents, and of monstrous and unhallowed alliances of which these children are the issue, largely prevail in this village. There it is held that the witch, like the poet, is so born. I have been gravely assured that there are well-known marks which distinguish the ill-wishers from all beside. These are black spots under the tongue; in number five, diagonally placed: “Like those, sir, which are always found in the feet of swine,”[140] and which, according to the belief of my poor people, and which, as a Scriptural authority, I was supposed unable to deny, were first made in the unclean animals by the entrance of the demons into the ancestral herd at Gadara. A peculiar kind of eyeball, sometimes bright and clear, and at others covered with a filmy gauze, like a gipsy’s eye, as it is said, by night; or a double pupil, ringed twice; or a larger eye on the left than on the right side; these are held to be tokens of evil omen, and accounted to indicate demoniac power, and certain it is that a peculiar glare or a glance of the eye does exist in those persons who are pointed out as in possession of the craft of the wizard or witch. But an ancient man, who lived in a lone house in a gorge near the church, once actually disclosed to me in mysterious whispers, and