was brewing drop from her skinny hands with a hideous yell; and the men-at-arms and the labourers that were gathered at the foot of the tower cast a look of dread and horror to windward and screamed like the witch, and then took to their heels and ran across the plain in the desperate hope of keeping before the winds and the flames, and paying no heed to the witch, who had no means of descending from her tower. “Ha! ha! thou hag! where is thy witch-tree of Beneventum now, which no mortal axe can cut down or lop, and no earthly fire consume? Ha! witch! where be the broad double channels and the rapid and cool streams of the river Calor? If they flowed by thee close as they used to do when thou wast perched on that witch-tree, high as is thy tower, wouldst not leap headlong into the deep water? Ha! accursed daughter of Leutard Iconoclastes, wouldst call upon the saints whose blessed effigies were broken by thy fathers sledge hammer? What! dost scream and raise thy skinny hands to Heaven? ’Tis vain, ’tis vain! the saints in Heaven will not hear thee, so down with thy hands towards earth and the fiery plain, and invoke the fiends to whom thou hast sold thy soul. So! so! the fire catcheth and thy tower of wood crackles in the flames, and the flames mount upward and embrace thee round about and lick thee with their blistering tongues! Ha! shriek and writhe! these flames give only a mild foretaste of thine eternal doom. These flames be but fed with dry rushes and fen-grass, and the wood of the oak and pine; but the unquenchable flames of the nethermost pit are fed with brimstone and naphtha. See! the tower falls and she is consumed, flesh and bones, in the hissing fire!—and so perish all witches!” Thus spake Girolamo of Salerno, like the true believer that he was, as the Norman witch was burning. But the hag did not perish alone; the crackling fire, carried onward by the strong wind, overtaking and consuming nearly all the Normans that had advanced with her into the plains to set up her accursed tower. Ivo Taille-Bois, with the rest of the Norman host, had stopped at the ford where the witch had crossed before she came into the plain; but when he saw the fire kindled and roll across the fen almost as rapidly as the waters of a mighty cataract, and saw the smoke arise and shut out the sight of the blessed sun, Ivo turned and fled, and every man with him fled in wild dismay, nor stopped until they came to the castle by Cam-Bridge. And the ford where the hag crossed over into the plain is called unto this day Witchford.[207]