St. Thomas’s Day, St. John’s Day, and Christmas Eve, as well as on Mondays, that they were dreaded. Then they would come into a neighbour’s house to beg, borrow, or steal something, no matter what; but woe to the poor wretch who suffered them to carry away so much as a chip or splinter of wood; for they would certainly use it to his undoing. On these witching nights the witches rode to their Sabbath on baking-forks and the dashers of churns; but if when they were hurtling through the darkness any one standing below addressed one of the witches by name, she would die within the year. To counteract and undo the spells which witches cast on man and beast, people resorted to all kinds of measures. Thus on the before-mentioned days folk made three crosses on the doors of the byres or guarded them by hanging up St. John’s wort, marjoram, or other equally powerful talismans. Very often, too, the village youth would carry the war into the enemy’s quarters by marching out in a body, cracking whips, firing guns, waving burning besoms, shouting and making an uproar, all for the purpose of frightening and driving away the witches.(245) In Prussia witches and warlocks used regularly to assemble twice a year on Walpurgis Night and the Eve of St. John. The places where they held their infernal Sabbath were various; for example, one was Pogdanzig, in the district of Schlochau. They generally rode on a baking-fork, but often on a black three-legged horse, and they took their departure up the chimney with the words, “Up and away and nowhere to stop!” When they were all gathered on the Blocksberg or Mount of the Witches, they held high revelry, feasting first and then dancing on a tight rope lefthanded-wise to the inspiring strains which an old warlock drew from a drum and a pig’s head.(246) The South Slavs believe that on the night of Midsummer Eve a witch will slink up to the fence of the farmyard and say, “The cheese to me, the lard to me, the butter to me, the milk to me, but the cowhide to thee!” After that the cow will perish miserably and you will be obliged to bury the flesh and sell the hide. To prevent this disaster the thing to do is to go out into the meadows very early on Midsummer morning while the dew is on the grass, collect a quantity of dew in a waterproof mantle, carry it home, and having tethered your cow wash her down with the dew. After that you have only to place a milkpail under her udders and to milk away as hard as you can; the amount of milk that you will extract from that cow’s dugs is quite surprising. Again, the Slovenians about Görz and the Croats of Istria believe that on the same night the witches wage pitched battles with baptized folk, attacking them fiercely with broken stakes of palings and stumps of trees. It is therefore a wise precaution to grub up all the stumps in autumn and carry them home, so that the witches may be weaponless on St. John’s Night. If the stumps are too heavy to be grubbed