Continuing our voyage in the evening, the beauty of the moonlit sea, and the singular forms of the rocky coast, served to beguile the way pleasantly. I saw a great many towers on the rocks, here and there a ruin, a church, or cloister. As we sailed past the old Church of St. Catherine of Sicco, which stands high and stately on the shore, the weather seemed going "to desolate itself," as they say in Italian, and threatened a storm. The old steersman, as we came opposite St. Catherine, doffed his baretto, and prayed aloud: "Holy Mother of God, Maria, we are sailing to Bastia; grant that we get safely into port!" The boatmen all took off their baretti, and devoutly made the sign of the cross. The moonlight breaking on the water from heavy black clouds; the fear of a storm; the grim, spectrally-lighted shore; and finally, St. Catherine,--suddenly brought over our entire company one of those moods which seek relief in ghost-stories. The boatmen began to tell them, in all varieties of the horrible and incredible. One of the passengers, meanwhile, anxious that at least not all Corsicans should seem, in the strangers' eyes, to be superstitious, kept incessantly shrugging his shoulders, indignant, as a person of enlightenment, that I should hear such nonsense; while another constantly supported his own and the boatmen's opinion, by the asseveration: "I have never seen witches with my own eyes, but that there is such a thing as the black art is undoubted." I, for my part, affirmed that I confidently believed in witches and sorceresses, and that I had had the honour of knowing some very fine specimens. The partisan of the black art, an inhabitant of Luri, had, I may mention, allowed me an interesting glimpse into his mysterious studies, when, in the course of a conversation about London, he very naïvely threw out the question, whether that great city was French or not. The Corsicans call the witch _strega_. Her _penchant_ is to suck, as vampire, the blood of children. One of the boatmen described to me how she looked, when he surprised her once in his father's house; she is black as pitch on the breast, and can transform herself from a cat into a beautiful girl, and from a beautiful girl into a cat. These sorceresses torment the children, make frightful faces at them, and all sorts of _fattura_. They can bewitch muskets, too, and make them miss fire. In this case, you must make a cross over the trigger, and, in general, you may be sure the cross is the best protection against sorcery. It is a very safe thing, too, to carry relics and amulets. Some of these will turn off a bullet, and are good against the bite of the venomous spider--the _malmignatto_. Among these amulets they had formerly in Corsica a "travelling-stone," such as is frequently mentioned in the Scandinavian legends. It was found at the Tower of Seneca only--was four-cornered, and contained iron. Whoever tied such a stone over his knee made a safe and easy journey.