The superstitious man, according to him, after having washed his hands with lustral waterthat is, water in which a torch from the altar had been quenchedgoes about with a laurel-leaf in his mouth, to keep off evil influences, as the pigs in Devonshire used, in my youth, to go about with a withe of mountain ash round their necks to keep off the evil eye.

Perhaps the basest of all uses to which theory has been put in this science was in a well-known American work, where facts and fancies in Ethnology were industriously woven together to form another withe about the limbs of the wretched African slave.

I peeled the shirt off, and Grim rigged it on a frame of basket-work, with a clumsy pitch-forked arrangement of withes at the bottom.

The houses had sharp, sloping roofs, made of huge clapboards, and these great wooden slabs were kept in place by long poles, bound with withes to the rafters.