Even as late as the summer of 1911 the word "witch" was heard in an Irish law-court, when an unhappy poor woman was tried for killing another, an old-age pensioner, in a fit of insanity.[62] One of the witnesses deposed that he met the accused on the road on the morning of the murder. She had a statue in her hand, and repeated three times: "I have the old witch killed: I got power from the Blessed Virgin to kill her. She came to me at 3 o'clock yesterday, and told me to kill her, or I would be plagued with rats and mice." She made much the same statement to another witness, and added: "We will be all happy now. I have the devils hunted away. They went across the hill at 3 o'clock yesterday." The evidence having concluded, the accused made a statement which was reduced to writing: "On the day of the thunder and lightning and big rain there did a rat come into my house, and since then I was annoyed and upset in my mind.... A lady came to me when I was lying in bed at night, she was dressed in white, with a wreath on her head, and said that I was in danger. I thought that she was referring to the rat coming into the house.... The lady who appeared to me said, If you receive this old woman's pension-book without taking off her clothes and cleaning them, and putting out her bed and cleaning up the house, you will receive dirt for ever, and rats and mice." Imagine the above occurring in 1611 instead of 1911! The ravings of the poor demented creature would be accepted as gospel-truth; the rat would be the familiar sent by the witch to torment her, the witnesses would have many more facts to add to their evidence, the credulous people would rejoice that the country-side had been freed from such a malignant witch (though they might regret that she had been given her _congé_ so easily), while the annals of Irish witchcraft would be the richer by nearly as extraordinary a case as that of Florence Newton, and one which would have lost nothing in the telling or the printing. Shorn of their pomp and circumstance, no doubt many witch-stories would be found to be very similar in origin to the above.