One night a neighbor met her, breathing heavily, her hand at her side, hobbling haltingly homeward. He told his wife he guessed the witch was pretty sick. She told the minister’s wife that the witch was getting her deserts. The latter in turn told her husband, and during a ministerial visit the next day he discoursed profitably on the probable illness and the unsanctified life of that misguided woman. The minister sat long in the front room sipping sangaree, but the hard-working little tailoress in the kitchen overheard his moralizing and his story. And when goose and shears were laid aside, and her day’s work was over, she hurried through the winter gloaming, across the ice-crusts of three fields, to the witch’s door. No light shone from the window, either of evil or domestic significance; but the tailoress pulled the latch-string and pushed open the door, and by the light of her hand-lantern found the witch in the chilled house cold and dead. The following August a band of wondering, marauding boys, with alternate hesitation and bravado, entered the tenantless house. The windows had all been broken by missiles thrown by witch-hating passers-by, and the spring rains and summer suns had freely entered the room. And lo! the witches bed, on which she died--a sack full of straw of mouse-barley, with occasional spikes of grain attached--had sprouted and grown through the coarse hempen bed-tick, and was as green and flourishing as the grass over her unmarked grave. WHERE THREE TOWNS MEET In the heart of Narragansett three towns meet at a cross-roads; they are North Kingston, South Kingston, and Exeter. It is a lonely cross-roads, even in days of summer, though Weaver Rose’s cheerful home is near it; but it is picturesque and beautiful in its extended view, its overreach of splendid locust-trees, and the tangle of wild flowers fringing the roadside and rioting along the stone walls. There is no monument or stone, nothing to mark the special tradition of this corner, as Squaw Rock at Indian Corner, half a mile farther on the road, a sinister rock with dark, blood-red veins and splashes, a rock whereon were dashed the brains of a Narragansett squaw by her drunken brave of a husband. This cross-roads, or “corner,” has been the scene many times of episodes as uncivilized, if not as cruel, as the one that immortalized Squaw Rock. Here--a spot chosen either through fancy, tradition, or even rustic fashion, or because here three townships meet--have taken place several of those absurd bequests of barbaric peoples known as shift-marriages.