y.

'Now, for instance,' he said aloud, 'if a good cow, that is a great pet
in the family, should suddenly cease to give her milk, how would you set
about curing her?'

The dame's small bright eyes grew keener. She moved to her
spinning-wheel and gave it a turn. 'Ay,' she said, 'and whose is the
cow?'

He was not without a genuine curiosity. 'What would you do for _any_ cow
in that case?'

'And is it Torrance's cow?' asked Mistress Betty. 'Och, but I know it's
Torrance's cow that ye're speiring for.'

The young minister was recalled to a sense of his duty. He rose up with
brisk dignity. 'I only asked you to see what you would say. I do not
believe the stories you have been telling me.'

She nodded her head, taking his assertion as a matter of course. 'But
I'll tell you exactly what they must do,' she said. 'Ye can tell Miss
Torrance she must get a pound of pins.'

'A pound of pins!' said he.

'Ay, it's a large quantity, but they'll have them at the store, for it's
more than sometimes they're wanted--a time here, a time there--against
the witches. And she's to boil them in whatever milk the cow gives, and
she's to pour them boiling hot into a hole in the ground; and when she's
put the earth over them, and the sod over that, she's to tether the
animal there, and milk it there, and the milk will come right enough.'

While the student was making his way home along the hillside, through
field and forest, the long arm of the sea turned to red and gold in the
light of the clouds which the sun had left behind when it sank down over
the distant region that the Cape Breton folk call Canada.

The minister meditated upon what he had heard, but not for long. He
could not bring his mind into such attitude towards the witch-tales as
to conceive of belief in them as an actual part of normal human
experience. Insanity, or the love of making a good story out of notions
which have never been seriously entertained, must compose the warp and
woof of the fabric of such strange imaginings. It is thus we account for
most experiences we do not understand.

The next evening the Torrance family were walking to meeting. The
student joined himself to Miss Torrance. He greeted her with the
whimsical look of grave humour. 'You are to take a pound of pins,' he
said.

'I do not believe it would do any good,' she interrupted eagerly.

It struck him as very curious that she should assert her unbelief. He
was too nonplussed to go on immed