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Updated: May 31, 2025
Then a wide, long shadow fell across the dimly lighted room, and from the darkened threshold a strangely deep, gasping peal of laughter rang from a man's broad breast. "Satabus! My boy!" the witch's shriek rose above the peculiar sound. "Mother!" answered the gray-bearded lips of the pirate. For one short moment he remained standing at the door with outstretched arms.
"So what about those incantations, Daisy?" he said. "I do not know what you mean, Mr. McFarlane." "No? don't you? That's odd. You have been so long in the witch's precincts. You have heard them, of course?" "I do not know what you mean, Mr. McFarlane." "Why you must have been bewitched. I wonder, now, if the witch's house did not seem to you a palace?" "It seemed a very nice place."
So my note-book was filled with figures which amazed me when I saw them afterwards, for my excited imagination had filled page after page with a perfect Witch's Sabbath of compositions, in which the oddest scrolls and throngs of genii blended with flowers, buds, and all sorts of emblems of love twined around initial letters or the picture of the person who had captured my heart at a time so inopportune.
A wild dance followed, the lovers now kneeling and beseeching the evil fairy to have pity on them, now rushing despairingly into each other's arms, while the witch's own dancing held all of threat and malevolence that superb artistry could infuse into it. The tale unfolded itself with the inevitableness of preordained catastrophe. Ritmagar declines to be appeased.
Reflection on the subject only left him the more hopelessly bewildered. If she hadn't loved him her course might have been explicable. As it was, he found himself driven to a choice between mental aberration on her part and a witch's spell, inclining to the latter with the witch in the guise of Aunt Emily. Not that he absolved himself. He made no attempt to do that.
There was a Laburnum Villa, and The Cedars, and a Cairngorm, rising to the height of three storeys, with a curious little turret that branched out at the top, and was crowned with a conical roof, so that it looked as if wearing a witch's hat.
As the huntsmen came up they crowded round him, and praised him; and then they fastened the witch's body to a horse by ropes, and dragged her to the bottom of the valley, where they buried her in a ditch. That night, when the miser heard of her death, he dropped down dead on the spot. As the lad was going home the queen appeared to him, and told him to be at the ring the following day at noon.
Now, as soon as the Prince had got rid of the witch's daughter he greeted the cinder wench as his bride, and they wandered together to the birch tree which grew upon the mother's grave. There they received all sorts of treasures and riches, three sacks full of gold, and as much silver, and a splendid steed, which bore them home to the palace.
"Who are you?" he said, shaking her slightly. "I am Babette, daughter of Count Karl of Eppenhain," said Babette proudly. "A Count's daughter a fine tale the witch's granddaughter you mean," he said with emphasis, and Babette shuddered. "Come along with me, child!" he continued, "you must follow me now, and serve me well and cook my dinners.
By this time the last veil of mist has withdrawn from the background, and in the place of the forest of firs the gingerbread house stands glistening with barley sugar in the sunshine. To the left is the Witch's oven, to the right a cage, all inside a fence of gingerbread children. A duet of admiration and amazement follows in a new, undulatory melody.
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