Though Tuggie did not get the coveted dye-stuff, nor the recipe therefor, she did not return home empty-handed; she managed to pick without discovery a few leafless twigs from the great bush of southernwood that grew by the stone doorstep of Bosum Sidet’s house, and she felt that her visit had not been in vain. Fortune favored her. As she passed the door of the tinker’s barn she slipped in unobserved and clipped a few hairs from the tail of his cow. It would have been much better, much surer, to have had these hairs from Bosum’s own head, but to aspire to a fibre of his close-cropped wool was useless. As Tuggie Bannocks walked home over the crisp snow she muttered to herself with delight, and she glowered and scowled at the children as she passed the school-house at the corner, and they hooted and jeered at her in return, and called out, “Te-Rap, Te-Rap,” which everyone knows is the greeting that witches cry out to each other. She certainly was deemed a witch by her neighbors as well as the children. And this reputation was not accidental, it was jealously cultivated. She conformed her mien and behavior to all that was expected of a witch; and she had been gifted by nature with one feature which, much to her satisfaction, enabled her to exhibit convincing proofs of her pretensions. She had two full rows of double teeth (front teeth and all were double), which could be displayed to telling and bewildering advantage to those who thought her “just like other folks.” She did have some uncanny habits; some that, a century previous, in a Puritan community, would have set her afloat to sink or swim. She never sat upon stool or chair or settle in anyone’s house; no one had ever seen her seated save on a table or dresser or bed, or even on a cradle-head--this to the painful apprehension of the mother who owned the cradle. When spinning flax in one house she sat on a saw-horse. She had not a chair in her house, but there was an oaken chair-moulding at the top of the wainscoting in her spacious old kitchen; and it was currently reported and believed that when she was alone she perched or clung with her heels on this moulding. The Newport chap-man, Chepa Rose, told at the Ferry that he saw her one night running round the room on the moulding. But Chepa was not truthful, so I do not believe it.