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The Evil Eye, and Allied Notions 15;
together (contrary to her usual custom) with her hands
folded in her lap. On being questioned by her Mistress,
the girl acknowledged that she was much disturbed in
mind, because she was quite sure that a certain old woman
who lived near, had '"overlooked" her. The lady reasoned
with her, but in vain ; at length, the family medical man
was consulted, he tried at first to laugh the girl out of her
fancies but it was of no use, she sjot worse and worse ;
on
being taken to the Island of Sark she entirely recovered
her normal health and spirits, but relapsed into her previous
melancholy condition on returning to Guernsey. In the end
it was thought best that she should go out to some relations
in America. She is now married there and doing well.
The following tale was taken down in 1890-91 from the
lips of a middle-aged English woman, whose parents settled
in Guernsey when she was a child ; she herself seemed half
to believe it, her mother (deceased two years before) evi-
dently did so completely, but her father, then a very old
man, scouted and still ridicules the idea of anyone having
such a power of doing evil. It is said that very old Guernsey
peasant folk are very deeply embued with a belief in witch-
craft and in being "overlooked," and that the young ones
laugh at such thing.s, but that when they in their turn reach
the forties or fifties they are just as credulous as their for-
bears. But to my story :
—
Mrs X., aged 44 years, was—when a child of ten, while
seated at tea with her parents—suddenly taken with a kind
of shaking fit, so violent was the attack that she knocked
the thines off the table ; it affected one side of her face
and of her body only. More than one doctor were consulted.