pulling ragwort by the roadside, getting each astride her ragwort
with the summons "Up horsie!" and flying away.

"The hag is astride
This night for a ride,
The devils and she together:
Through thick and through thin,
Now out and now in,
Though ne'er so foul be the weather.

* * * * *

"A thorn or a burr
She takes for a spur,
With a lash of the bramble she rides now.
Through brake and through briers,
O'er ditches and mires,
She follows the spirit that guides now."

HERRICK: _The Hag._

The meeting-place was arranged by the Devil, who sometimes rode
there on a goat. At their supper no bread or salt was eaten; they
drank out of horses' skulls, and danced, sometimes back to back,
sometimes from west to east, for the dances at the ancient Baal
festivals were from east to west, and it was evil and ill-omened to
move the other way. For this dance the Devil played a bag-pipe made
of a hen's skull and cats' tails.

"There sat Auld Nick, in shape o' beast;
A tousie tyke, black, grim, and large,
To gie them music was his charge:
He screw'd the pipes and gart them skirl,
Till roof and rafters a' did dirl."[1]

BURNS: _Tam o' Shanter._

[1] Ring.

The light for the revelry came from a torch flaring between the
horns of the Devil's steed the goat, and at the close the ashes
were divided for the witches to use in incantations. People
imagined that cats who had been up all night on Hallowe'en were
tired out the next morning.

Tam o' Shanter who was watching such a dance

"By Alloway's auld haunted kirk"

in Ayrshire, could not resist calling out at the antics of a
neighbor whom he recognized, and was pursued by the witches. He
urged his horse to top-speed,

"Now do thy speedy utmost, Meg,
And win the key-stane of the brig;
There at them thou thy tail may toss,
A running stream they dare na cross!"

BURNS: _Tam o' Shanter._

but poor Meg had no tail thereafter to toss at them, for though she
saved her rider, she was only her tail's length beyond the middle
of the bridge when the foremost witch grasped it and seared it to
a stub.

Such witches might be questioned about the past or future.

"He that dare sit on St. Swithin's Chair,
When the Night-Hag wings the troubled air,