, voice, and features which would have
made the fortune of an English witch finder in the days of Matthew Paris
or the Sir John Podgers of Dickens, and insured her speedy conviction in
King James's High Court of Justiciary. She was accused of divers ill-
doings,--such as preventing the cream in her neighbor's churn from
becoming butter, and snuffing out candles at huskings and quilting-
parties.

"She roamed the country far and near,
Bewitched the children of the peasants,
Dried up the cows, and lamed the deer,
And sucked the eggs, and killed the pheasants."

The poor old woman was at length so sadly annoyed by her unfortunate
reputation that she took the trouble to go before a justice of the
peace, and made solemn oath that she was a Christian woman, and no
witch.

Not many years since a sad-visaged, middle-aged man might be seen in the
streets of one of our seaboard towns at times suddenly arrested in the
midst of a brisk walk and fixed motionless for some minutes in the busy
thoroughfare. No effort could induce him to stir until, in his opinion,
the spell was removed and his invisible tormentor suffered him to
proceed. He explained his singular detention as the act of a whole
family of witches whom he had unfortunately offended during a visit down
East. It was rumored that the offence consisted in breaking off a
matrimonial engagement with the youngest member of the family,--a
sorceress, perhaps, in more than one sense of the word, like that
"winsome wench and walie" in Tam O'Shanter's witch-dance at Kirk
Alloway. His only hope was that he should outlive his persecutors; and
it is said that at the very hour in which the event took place he
exultingly assured his friends that the spell was forever broken, and
that the last of the family of his tormentors was no more.

When a boy, I occasionally met, at the house of a relative in an
adjoining town, a stout, red-nosed old farmer of the neighborhood.
A fine tableau he made of a winter's evening, in the red light of a
birch-log fire, as he sat for hours watching its progress, with sleepy,
half-shut eyes, changing his position only to reach the cider-mug on the
shelf near him. Although he seldom opened his lips save to assent to
some remark of his host or to answer a direct question, yet at times,
when the cider-mug got the better of his taciturnity, he would amuse us
with interesting details of his earl