a magic golden apple, or, for that matter, a benevolent old lady pure and simple. Sometimes, it is true, as with characters in a realistic novel, the witch of fiction may pass for an impressionistic study of the real witch. Thus in the famous story of Hänsel and Gretel she is so far realistic as to desire the capture of small children. But, instead of acting thus in the service and for the honour of her master the Devil, she is moved by no nobler impulse than the desire to eat them, and thus shows herself not a witch at all--for your true witch is always altruistic--nothing better, indeed, than a greedy old cannibal. Her methods, again, however creditable to their inventor, are by no means such as would have commended themselves to the economical tastes of her Satanic employer. The real witch was never yet provided with the capital necessary to build herself houses of "sugar and spice and all that's nice" either as residence or decoy. She lived notoriously in hovels--unless, indeed, she had private means--and the profits of her infernal bargain, even when she received them, were never sufficient to provide her with more than the barest living. Grimm's cannibal, with her roof of chocolate and walls of marzipan, might have been a sorceress; she certainly was no witch. More realistic, and thus all the more misleading, are the weird sisters in Macbeth. Did we take them as representative types of witchdom, we should be as much deceived as were he who, reading nothing but newspapers, believed that English life was made up of murders, divorces, political speeches and judicial witticisms. They give us, indeed, an excellent impressionist idea of the witch as she appeared in the public eye, some valuable recipes for potions, apt illustrations of divinatory methods and so forth, but no suggestion whatever of that quiet home life wherein the witch, like the British public, passed most of her existence. No doubt she occasionally took part in social reunions, in caverns or on blasted heaths, with Hecate as the guest of the evening; no doubt she there interchanged ideas as to the surest means of drowning sailors or ruining kingdoms. But these were only paragraphs in the story of her life, very much as being tried for murder or presented at Court are outstanding incidents in the life-story of the average Briton. For the most part, she spent her time in the quiet seclusion of her hovel, adding to her stock of every-day poisons or giving interviews to the local peasantry. Of this Shakespeare tells us nothing; to judge from the witches in Macbeth they might have spent the whole of their time waiting about on Scottish moorlands on the chance of making history.