Gotta Sell Those Hats!

       There's always another day in Tahiti. Apropos of the natives' light regard for time, Mrs. Winkelstroetter tells us of the boat from the Austral Islands that was about to return to that group when an old lady objected:

     "But, Captain, just wait a little. I have ten hats to sell yet."

     So he postponed sailing until the next day.

     But she still had seven hats to sell. Sailing was put off from day to day. Each morning the captain and passengers would assemble ready to depart. The old lady would complain and the boat would lie over. So it went for a week.

     "Now really," the captain said, "I must sail. Haven't you sold all your hats?"

     "All but one - but it is a very ugly one and nobody will buy it."

     The captain pulled out ten francs.

     "I'll buy it myself,"

     He did, and thanks to this prompt and decisive action on his part, the boat sailed only a week late.

Reference:  Willard Price (1955), Adventures in Paradise, quoted in The Wild World Magazine Oct 1956 (Australia), Sept. 1956 (UK), p x

The Danger of Dealing with a Witch

      Unrequited love! One of life's great frustrations! Haven't we all been a position whereby a little love magic would come in handy - preferably a type which could not be used by our rival, or against us? (That's the trouble, of course, with magic: it works both ways.) In the 1920s journalist, W. B. Seabrook went to Haiti to investigate Voodoo, and reported on how a young man called Paul, besotted with a woman who had rejected him, asked his grandmother, Maman Célie for help. In response, she ground into powder a dead hummingbird, all the time chanting prayers or spells, added a few dried drops of her grandson's blood and semen, plus the pollen of jungle flowers, and placed it in a pouch made from the scrotum of a billy goat. Now the fun part: how was he going to get the object of his affection to eat or drink the stuff? 

A Noise Annoys a Caterpillar

      Caterpillars! They descended as a ravenous plague on the Catskill Mountains of New York State in the years 1897-9. Green worms, or tree caterpillars the farmers called them, as they watched in stupefied impotence while their fruit and maple trees were transformed into bare branch skeletons by the voracious pests. Nothing, it seemed, could save them from ruin. Nothing the scientists could suggest made any difference. Where was the Pied Piper when you needed him most?