ng else can do.
Therefore I have great hope that these fairy-tales of Florence, and
strange fables of its fountains, palaces, and public places--as they are
truly gathered from old wives, and bear in themselves unmistakable
evidences of antiquity--will be of real use in impressing on many
memories much which is worth retaining, and which would otherwise have
been forgotten.

The manner in which these stories were collected was as follows:--In the
year 1886 I made the acquaintance in Florence of a woman who was not only
skilled in fortune-telling, but who inherited as a family gift from
generations, skill in witchcraft--that is, a knowledge of mystical cures,
the relieving people who were bewitched, the making amulets, and who had
withal a memory stocked with a literally incredible number of tales and
names of spirits, with the invocations to them, and strange rites and
charms. She was a native of the Romagna Toscana, where there still lurks
in the recesses of the mountains much antique Etrusco-Roman heathenism,
though it is disappearing very rapidly. Maddalena--such was her
name--soon began to communicate to me all her lore. She could read and
write, but beyond this never gave the least indication of having opened a
book of any kind; albeit she had an immense library of folk-lore in her
brain. When she could not recall a tale or incantation, she would go
about among her extensive number of friends, and being perfectly familiar
with every dialect, whether Neapolitan, Bolognese, Florentine, or
Venetian, and the ways and manners of the poor, and especially of
witches, who are the great repositories of legends, became in time
wonderfully well skilled as a collector. Now, as the proverb says, "Take
a thief to catch a thief," so I found that to take a witch to catch
witches, or detect their secrets, was an infallible means to acquire the
arcana of sorcery. It was in this manner that I gathered a great part of
the lore given in my "Etruscan-Roman Remains." I however collected
enough, in all conscience, from other sources, and verified it all
sufficiently from classic writers, to fully test the honesty of my
authorities.

The witches in Italy form a class who are the repositories of all the
folk-lore; but, what is not at all generally known, they also keep as
strict secrets an _immense_ number of legends of their own, which have
nothing in common with the nursery or popular tales, such as are commonly
collected and pub