For an ordinary person, or even an ordinary wizard, finding a wizard in a vast sea of people was no easy task.
Unless they specifically went somewhere wizards gathered, such as Diagon Alley.
Otherwise, even if a wizard walked right past them, they might not realize he was a wizard.
Well, in ancient times, probably before the Middle Ages, wizards had been a little easier to distinguish.
Back then, because of certain superstitious-or ignorant-beliefs, Europeans generally did not bathe and were filthy and foul-smelling.
Wizards could not stand that, mainly because they did not believe those ignorant theories either, so they tended to keep themselves fairly clean.
That made them rather conspicuous among Muggles.
One of the criteria people used to identify witches back then was that they were good-looking and clean.
Well, there were undoubtedly cases where women, jealous of other women's beauty, falsely accused them of being witches.
But quite often, that method of identification really did catch wizards.
Far more often, though, even when wizards were caught and executed in various ways-mostly burned at the stake-it was all because they were bored and had gone to amuse themselves by toying with Muggles.
Then they used magic to fake their deaths and escape, letting the Muggles believe they had killed a wizard. One day, when they were bored out of their minds again, they would change their appearance and do it all over again.
Many nasty wizards had once played that game. Most came out fine, though a few took it too far and came to grief.
In modern times, however, aside from those particularly old-fashioned types who refused to accept anything new and insisted on wearing bizarre clothes-there had been plenty of idiots who made spectacles of themselves with their outfits at the Quidditch World Cup three