If the Witches are married, it becomes necessary to administer to their husbands a potion that shall cause them to slumber and keep them asleep during the Witches’ absence in the night. For this purpose the Sleep-Apple, a mossy sort of excrescence on the Wild Rose, and Hawthorn (called in the Edda Sleep-Thorn), are employed, because they will not allow anyone to awake till they are taken away. A very favourite plant made use of by American Witches to produce a similar result, is the _Flor de Pesadilla_, or Nightmare Flower of Buenos Ayres, a small, dark-green foliaged plant, with lanceolate leaves and clusters of greenish-white flowers, which emit a powerful narcotic smell. From the acrid milky juice pressed from the stem of this plant, Witches obtain a drug which, administered to their victims, keeps them a prey all night to terrible dreams, from which they awake with a dull throbbing sensation in the brain, while a peculiar odour pervades the chamber, causing the air to appear heavy and stifling. Ben Jonson, in his ‘Masque of Queens,’ introduces therein a conventicle of Witches, who, as part of the business which has brought them together, relate their deeds. One of the hags, who has been gathering that mysterious plant of superstition, the Mandragora, croaks:-- “I last night lay all alone On the ground, to hear the Mandrake groan; And plucked him up, though he grew full low; And, as I had done, the cock did crow.” Another, whose sinister proceedings have excited the neighbouring watch-dogs, remarks:-- “And I ha’ been plucking plants among Hemlock, Henbane, Adder’s-tongue; Nightshade, Moonwort, Libbard’s-bane, And twice by the dogs was like to be ta’en.” And a third, who has procured a supply of the plants needful for the working of the Witches’ spells, says:-- “Yes, I have brought to help our vows Homed Poppy, Cypress boughs, The Fig-tree wild that grows on tombs, And juice that from the Larch-tree comes.” One of the principal results of the knowledge possessed by Witches of the properties of herbs was the concoction by them of noxious or deadly potions with which they were enabled to work their impious spells. Ovid tells us how Medea, in compounding a poisonous draught, employed Monk’s-hood or Wolfs-bane, the deadly _Aconitum_, that sprang up from the foam of the savage many-headed Cerberus, the watch-dog of the infernal regions:-- “Medea to dispatch a dang’rous heir (She knew him) did a poisonous draught prepare, Drawn from a drug long while reserved in store, For desp’rate uses, from the Scythian shore, That from the Echidnæan monster’s jaws Derived its origin.” Medea’s sister, the Enchantress Circe, having been neglected by a youth for whom she had conceived a passion, turned him, by means of a herb potion, into a brutal shape, for “Love refused, converted to disdain. Then, mixing powerful herbs with magic art, She changed his form who could not change his heart.”