Precisely in that way it was that the British witch operated. She, _by her eye_, blighted the natural powers of growth and fertility. By the way, I ought to mention, as a case parallel to that of the Bible's recognising witchcraft, and of enlightened nations continuing to punish it, that St. Paul himself, in an equal degree, recognises the _evil eye;_ that is, he uses the idea, (though certainly not meaning to accredit such an idea,) as one that briefly and energetically conveyed his meaning to those whom he was addressing. 'Oh, foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?' That is, literally, who has fascinated your senses by the evil eye? For the Greek is, _tis umas ebaskanen?_ Now the word _ebaskanen_ is a past tense of the verb _baskaino_, which was the technical term for the action of the evil eye. Without having written a treatise on the Æolic digamma, probably the reader is aware that F is V, and that, in many languages, B and V are interchangeable letters through thousands of words, as the Italian _tavola_, from the Latin _tabula_. Under that little process it was that the Greek _baskaino_ transmigrated into the Latin _fascino_; so that St. Paul's word, in speaking to the Galatians, is the very game word as Virgil's, in speaking of the shepherd's flock as charmed by the evil eye.] There was as much difference as between a Roman Proconsul, surrounded with eagle-bearers, and a commercial Consul's clerk with a pen behind his ear. Apparently she was not so much a Medea as an Erichtho. (See the _Pharsalia_.) She was an _Evocatrix_, or female necromancer, evoking phantoms that stood in some unknown relation to dead men; and then by some artifice (it has been supposed) of ventriloquism,[Footnote: I am not referring to German infidels. Very pious commentators have connected her with the _engastrimuthoi_ (εγγαστριμυθοι) or ventriloquists.] causing these phantoms to deliver oracular answers upon great political questions. Oh, that one had lived in the times of those New-England wretches that desolated whole districts and terrified vast provinces by their judicial murders of witches, under plea of a bibliolatrous warrant; until at last the fiery furnace, which they had heated for women and children, shot forth flames that, like those of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace, seizing upon his very agents, began to reach some of the murderous judges and denouncers!