First catch, your toad
p. 90 · Read in the full issue
British dedication to do-it-yourself medical therapy finds its most complete expression in eccentric wart cures. Since warts are apparently highly susceptible to incantations and other minor witchery, one can rub them with a warty toad a mere nine times and within nine days hope to be cured. Should this fail, however, one should trail a bean over the damned spot and bury the bean in the garden. As it rots, the experts tell us, the wart can be expected to disappear. Alternatively you can place a number of pebbles in a paper bag, each pebble representing a wart. The bag should be deposited at the most convenient crossroads where the first in quisitive passer-by to pick it up automatically inherits the warts. If all failed, one could always resort to outright witchery by drawing upon the therapeutic powers of that feline familiar, the domestic cat. Rub her tail over the wart nine times—but remember it must be a ginger cat and born in the month of May.