370 NOTES TO BOOK 1v.

usual, it is not uncommon to impute the cause to the'infernal

agency of some unlucky old woman. Several years ago one of the settlers went to a magistrate and

lodged a complaint against his neighbour, alleging that he was guilty of witchcraft. The magistrate was silly enough, but probably through ignorance, to summon the accused man before him, who was, however, declared innocent of holding any intercourse with his Satanic majesty. The man insisted on a written statement from the magistrate to that eflect, which, as was related to me bya very respectable gentleman in the colony, ended in a kind of accidental rhyme, and in the following words :

“ Of witchcraft he’s as free

As man can be. William M‘Kie, J. P."

An old man at Richmond Bay, who gave out that he was gifted with the second sigh_t,_was so far infatuated, that being on the shore on ancalm day in summer, near where a young man at the time had turned over in a broken canoe, quite within the reach of this old man to save him, he calmly allowed him to drown, in consequence, as he said, of a supernatural sight which his “ gift” had enabled him to perceive a few days before.