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.