The manner in which these stories were collected was as follows:—In the year 1886 I made the acquaintance in Florence of a woman who was not only skilled in fortune-telling, but who inherited as a family gift from generations, skill in witchcraft—that is, a knowledge of mystical cures, the relieving people who were bewitched, the making amulets, and who had withal a memory stocked with a literally incredible number of tales and names of spirits, with the invocations to them, and strange rites and charms. She was a native of the Romagna Toscana, where there still lurks in the recesses of the mountains much antique Etrusco-Roman heathenism, though it is disappearing very rapidly. Maddalena—such was her name—soon began to communicate to me all her lore. She could read and write, but beyond this never gave the least indication of having opened a book of any kind; albeit she had an immense library of folk-lore in her brain. When she could not recall a tale or incantation, she would go about among her extensive number of friends, and being perfectly familiar with every dialect, whether Neapolitan, Bolognese, Florentine, or Venetian, and the ways and manners of the poor, and especially of witches, who are the great repositories of legends, became in time wonderfully well skilled as a collector. Now, as the proverb says, “Take a thief to catch a thief,” so I found that to take a witch to catch witches, or detect their secrets, was an infallible means to acquire the arcana of sorcery. It was in this manner that I gathered a great part of the lore given in my “Etruscan-Roman Remains.” I however collected enough, in all conscience, from other sources, and verified it all sufficiently from classic writers, to fully test the honesty of my authorities. The witches in Italy form a class who are the repositories of all the folk-lore; but, what is not at all generally known, they also keep as strict secrets an _immense_ number of legends of their own, which have nothing in common with the nursery or popular tales, such as are commonly collected and published. The real witch-story is very often only a frame, so to speak, the real picture within it being the _arcanum_ of a long _scongiurazione_ or incantation, and what ingredients were used to work the charm. I have given numbers of these real witch-tales in my “Etruscan-Roman Remains,” and a few, such as “Orpheus and Eurydice,” “Intialo,” and “Il Moschone,” in this work.