om
his sight in this storm, he knew not how; and how immediately intense
pains began to torture his joints, until he became half frantic with
agony, and had been compelled, by hideous visions, to quit the shelter
he had sought, in order to be exposed to all the peltings of the storm.
He had since suffered, he declared, the tortures of the damned in all
his limbs, with occasional fits of shuddering, sometimes of hot fever,
sometimes of the most freezing cold, which were evidently torments
worked upon him by the powers of darkness. And as he spoke, the unhappy
wretch was again seized by one of his fearful fits of ague, during the
convulsions of which the clamours of the crowd grew terrible against the
sorceress.

"What sayest thou to this accusation, woman?" said the chief
_schreiber_. "Thou see'st how even now he suffers."

"I have never willed evil to any man--not even to him," was Magdalena's
only reply.

When recovered from his fit, the cripple again raised his head--it was
to cast a glance at the object of his denunciation, in which hatred and
triumph were blended together, in one of those occasional flashes of
wildness which showed that there was a vein of insanity running through
all the frenzied zeal of the witchfinder. He had now arrived at a period
of his narration, when the most damning proof of all was to overwhelm
the accused woman.

It was not without an unaffected expression of horror, that he went on
to relate how he had wandered around the building by the Watergate, in a
lower cell of which he had discovered that she dwelt, seeking in vain to
find an entrance or a peep-hole, that might enable him to penetrate into
the interior; how he had, at last, dragged his crippled limbs up into a
tree upon the river's bank, overlooking an upper chamber of the
building; how he had, at first, seen Mother Magdalena in conversation
with the young illuminator; how, upon his departure, she had flung
herself down upon her knees, and after spitting upon one of the books of
holy writ upon the table, had made wild gestures of conjuration, upon
which the demon himself, attired in a dark robe, had suddenly appeared
by supernatural means, for he had not entered by the door; how the foul
hag had fallen down and worshipped the arch-fiend; and how, after a
conference of short duration, during which the woman at his feet
appeared to supplicate with earnestness, probably a prolongation of her
wretched term of power to work ill, a