the time I came to make her acquaintance she was a bedridden toothless crone, with chin and nose all but meeting.  She did not discourage in her neighbours the idea that she knew more than people ought to know, and had more power than others had.  Many years before I knew her it happened one spring that the ducks, which were a part of her charge, failed to lay eggs....  She at once took it for granted that the ducks had been bewitched.  This misbelief involved very shocking consequences, for it necessitated the idea that so diabolical an act could only be combated by diabolical cruelty.  And the most diabolical act of cruelty she could imagine was that of baking alive in a hot oven one of the ducks.  And that was what she did.  The sequence of thought in her mind was that the spell that had been laid on the ducks was that of preternaturally wicked wilfulness; that this spell could only be broken through intensity of suffering, in this case death by burning; that the intensity of suffering would break the spell in the one roasted to death; and that the spell broken in one would be altogether broken, that is, in all the ducks....  Shocking, however, as was this method of exorcising the ducks, there was nothing in it original.  Just about a hundred years before, everyone in the town and neighbourhood of Ipswich had heard, and many had believed, that a witch had been burnt to death in her own house at Ipswich by the process of burning alive one of the sheep she had bewitched.  It was curious, but it was as convincing as curious, that the hands and feet of this witch were the only parts of her that had not been incinerated.  This, however, was satisfactorily explained by the fact that the four feet of the sheep, by which it had been suspended over the fire, had not been destroyed in the flames that had consumed its body."[754] According to a slightly different account of the same tragic incident, the last of the “Ipswitch witches,” one Grace Pett, “laid her hand heavily on a farmer’s sheep, who, in order to punish her, fastened one of the sheep in the ground and burnt it, except the feet, which were under the earth.  The next morning Grace Pett was found burnt to a cinder, except her feet.  Her fate is recorded in the Philosophical Transactions as a case of spontaneous combustion."[755]

[In burning the bewitched animal you burn the witch herself.]

This last anecdote is instructive, if perhaps not strictly authentic.  It shows that in burning alive one of a bewitched flock or herd what you really do is to burn the witch, who is either actually incarnate in the animal or perhaps more probably stands in a relation of sympathy with it so close as almost to amount to identity.  Hence if you burn the creature to ashes, you utterly destroy the witch and thereby save the whole of the rest of the flock or herd from her abominable machinations; whereas if you only partially burn the animal, allowing some parts of it to escape the flames, the witch is only half-baked, and her power