mystery, which underlie all human experience, and repeated in myriad
forms find their classic expression in the queries of the "Weird
Sisters," "_those elemental avengers without sex or kin_"?

"When shall we three meet again,
In thunder, lightning or in rain?
When the hurly burly's done,
When the battle's lost and won."

Are not the mummeries of the witches about the cauldron in Macbeth, and
Talbot's threat pour la Pucelle,

"Blood will I draw on thee, thou art a witch,"

uttered so long ago, echoed in the wailing cry of La Meffraye in the
forests of Machecoul, in the maledictions of Grio, and of the Saga of
the Burning Fields?

Their vitality is also clearly shown in their constant use and
exemplification by the romance and novel writers who appeal with
certainty and success to the popular taste in the tales of spectral
terrors. Witness: Farjeon's _The Turn of the Screw_; Bierce's _The
Damned Thing_; Bulwer's _A Strange Story_; Cranford's _Witch of Prague_;
Howells' _The Shadow of a Dream_; Winthrop's _Cecil Dreeme_; Grusot's
_Night Side of Nature_; Crockett's Black Douglas; and _The Red Axe_,
Francis' _Lychgate Hall_; Caine's _The Shadow of a Crime_; and countless
other stories, traditions, tales, and legends, written and unwritten,
that invite and receive a gracious hospitality on every hand.