Between blessing and banning it soon became evident that many formulas of words could be used to bring about mysterious results. It is probable that the Exorcism in its original was simply the angry, elevated tone of voice which animals as well as men instinctively employ to repel an enemy or express a terror. For this unusual language would be chosen, remembered, and repeated. With every new utterance this outcry or curse would be more seriously pronounced or enlarged till it became an Ernulphian formula. The next step would be to give it metric form, and its probable development is very interesting. It does not seem to have occurred to many investigators that in early ages all things whatever which were remembered and repeated were droned and intoned, or sing-sung, until they fell of themselves into a kind of metre. In all schools at the present day, where boys are required to repeat aloud and all together the most prosaic lessons, they end by chanting them in rude rhythm. All monotone, be it that of a running brook, falls into cadence and metre. All of the sagas, or legends, of the Algonkin-Wabanaki were till within even fifty years chants or songs, and if they are now rapidly losing that character it is because they are no longer recited with the interest and accuracy which was once observed in the narrators. But it was simply because all things often repeated were thus intoned that the exorcisms became metrical. It is remarkable that among the Aryan races it assumed what is called the staff-rhyme, like that which Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, and Byron, and many more employ, as it would seem, instinctively, whenever witches speak or spells or charms are uttered. It will not escape the reader that, in the Hungarian gypsy incantations in this work, the same measure is used as that which occurs in the Norse sagas, or in the scenes of Macbeth. It is also common in Italy. This is intelligible--that its short, bold, deeply-marked movement has in itself something mysterious and terrible. If that wofully-abused word "weird" has any real application to anything, it is to the staff-rhyme. I believe that when a man, and particularly a woman, does not know what else to say, he or she writes "lurid," or "weird," and I lately met with a book of travels in which I found the latter applied seventy-six times to all kinds of conundrums, until I concluded that, like the coachman's definition of an idea in Heine's "Reisebilder," it meant simply "any d----d nonsense that a man gets into his head." But if weird really and only means that which is connected with fate or destiny, from the Anglo-Saxon Weordan, to become, German, Werden, then it is applicable enough to rhymes setting forth the future and spoken by the "weird sisters," who are so-called not because they are awful or nightmarish, or pokerish, or mystical, or bug-a-boorish, but simply because they predict the future or destiny of men. "The