for any
barne that was tane away with ane evill blast of wind, or elf grippit,
she gait and speirit[1] at Thom what myght help them; and Thom would
pull ane herb and gif her out of his awin hand, and bade her scheir[2]
the same with ony other kind of herbis, and oppin the beistes mouth, and
put thame in, and the beist wald mend."[3]

[Footnote 1: Inquired.]

[Footnote 2: Chop.]

[Footnote 3: Pitcairn, I. ii. 51, et seq.]

It seems hardly possible to believe that a story like this, which is
half marred by the attempt to partially modernize its simple pathetic
language, and which would probably bring a tear to the eye, if not a
shilling from the pocket, of the most unsympathetic being of the present
day, should be considered sufficient three hundred years ago, to convict
the narrator of a crime worthy of death; yet so it was. This sad
picture of the breakdown of a poor woman's intellect in the unequal
struggle against poverty and sickness is only made visible to us by the
light of the flames that, mercifully to her perhaps, took poor Bessie
Dunlop away for ever from the sick husband, and weakly children, and the
"ky," and the humble hovel where they all dwelt together, and from the
daily, heart-rending, almost hopeless struggle to obtain enough food to
keep life in the bodies of this miserable family. The historian--who
makes it his chief anxiety to record, to the minutest and most
irrelevant details, the deeds, noble or ignoble, of those who have
managed to stamp their names upon the muster-roll of Fame--turns
carelessly or scornfully the page which contains such insignificant
matter as this; but those who believe

"That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivel'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain,"

will hardly feel that poor Bessie's life and death were entirely without
their meaning.

103. As the trials for witchcraft increase, however, the details grow
more and more revolting; and in the year 1590 we find a most
extraordinary batch of cases--extraordinary for the monstrosity of the
charges contained in them, and also for the fact that this feature, so
insisted upon in Macbeth, the raising of winds and storms, stands out in
extremely bold relief. The explanation of this is as follows. In the
year 1589, King James VI. brought his bride, Anne of Denmark, home to
Scotland. During the voyage an unusually violent storm raged, which
scattered