My grandfather was called an atheist by several people here, because he scoffed at witch-craft, “a thing attested by the Word of God.” If you denied the Witch of Endor, you might as well deny John Baptist or Saint Paul. Witch-craft was as well attested as the miracles. But then they said that miracles had ceased, yet said the Bible showed that there was witch-craft still. In very early life I felt certain that a woman here must be a witch, because she looked it. She lived in a cottage that had a great big open fireplace, and she sat there cowering over the fire on the hearth, with her walking-stick leant up across her knees. I had no doubts about her flying up the chimney on that stick, and always hoped she would while I was there. We have substitutes for most things now, even substitutes for witches. My father noted in his diary on 7 April 1844, “Witch-craft a common belief to this day in Lustleigh, and prevalent even among the better-informed classes.” And now I note that alien-espionage has been just as common a belief from 1914 onwards, and especially among those classes. They scent spies and aliens as keenly as the old folk scented witches; but the mania is more expensive now.--Two young men had bought a lonely cottage in a wood, and were living their own life up there. Until the War nobody ever suggested that they were anything but English. Then people said that they were German, and would as readily have said that they were Japanese or Russian, if we had been at war with Russia or Japan. And then a more inventive person said they had a gun-platform of concrete underneath their lawn. In a careless moment the editor of a local paper put that in. It was a costly blunder, and the lawyers profited. There are people everywhere just now with such a comprehensive hate of Germany that they tell us to abjure all German things for evermore; but I notice that the men who talk like this, are almost always wearing German hats. Instead of saying that the hat is Tyrolese or Homburg or whatever German type it really is, they say it is of English make and call it Trilby or some other name like that. Yet these same men are always preaching that a German is a German always, although he has been naturalized or born here and has assumed an English name. In speaking of the politicians who governed France in 1871, Bismarck said that some of them had Jewish names but several more had Jewish noses. People here think only of the alien name, forgetting that the alien blood is just as active in descendants in the female line, though the name has lapsed on marriage. There is the progeny of a Dutchman who settled at Exeter in the reign of William the Third. Nobody bothered about the female line; but descendants in male line were hunted out as Germans by a pack of people who knew too little of language or of history to recognize the name as Dutch.