The young and beautiful witch can work as much evil as the ancient crone, perhaps more, since her emotions are wilder and more unrestrained. She can project a curse that reaches its victim across the ocean, when the one who sent the curse is rotting in the tomb, as in _The Curse of the Cashmere Shawl_, where a betrayed and deserted woman in India sends a rare shawl to her rival, then drowns herself. Months after, when the husband, forgetful of the source, lays the shawl around his wife's shoulders, the dead woman takes her place. After this gruesome transfer of personality, the wife, impelled by a terrible urge she cannot understand, drowns herself as the other has done months before. Oscar Wilde[151] shows a young and lovely witch with a human longing for the love of the young man who throws away his soul for love of a mermaid. Through life's tragic satire, she is compelled, in spite of her entreaties, to show him how he may damn himself and win the other's affection. The jealousy shown here and in other instances is an illustration of the human nature of the witch, who, like the devil, makes a strong appeal to our sympathy in spite of the undoubted iniquity. [151] In _The Fisherman and his Soul_. The element of symbolism enters largely into the witch-creations, even from the time of Shakespeare's Three in _Macbeth_, who are terrible symbolic figures of the evil in man's soul. They appear as the visible embodiment of Macbeth's thoughts, and by their mysterious suggestive utterances tempt him to put his unlawful dreams into action. They seem both cause and effect here, for though when they first appear to him his hands are innocent of blood, his heart is tainted with selfish ambition, and their whispers of promise hurry on the deed. In _Ancient Sorceries_, by Algernon Blackwood, the village is full of persons who at night by the power of an ancestral curse, a heritage of subliminal memory, become witches, horrible cat-creatures, unhuman, that dance the blasphemous dance of the Devil's Sabbath. The story symbolizes the eternal curse that rests upon evil, the undying quality of thought and action that cannot cease when the body of the sinner has become dust, but reaches out into endless generations. In _Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts_ by A. T. Quiller-Couch, we see a witch, a young woman whose soul is under a spell from the devil. She gives rich gifts to the church, but her offerings turn into toads and vipers, defiling the sanctuary, and as she sings her wild songs the bodies of drowned men come floating to the surface of the water and join in the words of her song. Her beauty is supernatural and accursed, yet her soul is innocent of wish to do evil, though it leaves her body and goes like a cresseted flame at night to follow the devil, while the body is powerless in sleep. Finally the devil comes in the form of a Moor, possibly a suggestion from _Zofloya_, and summons her, when she dies, with a crucifix clasped over her heart.