s
extinguished for ever. "May God pardon him, as well as those who have
thus cruelly witnessed against me; and may He bless him, and all those
who are most near and dear to him," she continued--her voice, as she
spoke, growing gradually more subdued, until it was lost and choked in
convulsive sobbings.

Again a thrill of horror passed through the Ober-Amtmann; for the sound
of the voice seemed to revive in his mind memories of the past, and
recall a vision he had already striven to dispel from it. His frame
shuddered, and again he fell back in his chair.

"It is a delusion of Satan!" he muttered, pressing his hands to his
ears, and closing his eyes.

Bertha's eyes streamed with tears; her pitying heart was tortured by
this scene of sadness.

"Blessings instead of curses upon those who have condemned her! Can that
be guilt?" said gentle Gottlob to himself. "Can that be the spirit of
the malicious and revengeful agent of the dark deeds of Satan? No--she
is innocent; and I will still save her, if human means can save!"

After thus parleying with himself, Gottlob began to struggle to make his
way from the court.

"The blessings of the servants of the fiend are bitter curses," said the
infatuated witchfinder, on the other hand; "and she has blessed me. God
stand by me!"

"To the stake!--to the stake!" still howled the pitiless, the
bloodthirsty crowd.

The refusal of the unhappy Magdalena to abide by the issue of the
well-known trial by water, had so much abridged the customary
proceedings, that orders were given, and preparations made, for the
execution of the ultimate punishment for the crime of witchcraft--burning
at the stake--shortly after daybreak on the morrow.

It was yet night--a short hour before the breaking of the dawn. The pile
had been already heaped in the market-place of Hammelburg--the stake
fixed. All was in readiness for the hideous performance about to take
place. The guards paced backwards and forwards before the grated
doorway, which opened under the terrace of the old town-hall; for there,
in that miserable hole, was confined the wretched victim of popular
delusion. The soldiers kept watch, however, upon their prisoner at such
a distance as to be as far as possible out of the reach of her malefic
spells. The heavy clanking of their pikes, as they rested them from time
to time upon the pavement, or paused to interchange a word, alone broke
the silence of the still sleeping town--sleeping, to