ey believed to be the most desperate wrong achievable. Many there were
who sought to be initiated in the black art. They were re-baptized with
the support of responsible witch sponsors, abjured Christ, and entered
to the best of their belief into a compact with the devil; and forthwith
commenced a course of bad works, poisoning and bewitching men and
cattle, and the like, or trying to do so.

One feature transpired in these details, that is merely pathetic, not
horrifying or disgusting.

The little children of course talked witchcraft, and you may fancy,
Archy, what charming gossip it must have made. Then the poor little
things were sadly wrought on by the tales they told. And they fell into
trances and had visions shaped by their heated fancies.

A little maid, of twelve years of age, used to fall into fits of sleep,
and afterwards she told her parents, and _the judge_, how an old woman
and her daughter, riding on a broom-stick, had come and taken her out
with them. The daughter sat foremost, the old woman behind, the little
maid between them. They went away through the roof of the house, over
the adjoining houses and the town gate, to a village some way off. There
they went down a chimney of a cottage into a room, where sat a tall
black man and twelve women. They eat and drank. The black man filled
their glasses from a can, and gave each of the women a handful of gold.
She herself had received none; but she had eaten and drank with them.

A list of persons burned in Salzburg for participation in witchcraft
between the years 1627 and 1629 in an outbreak of this frenzy, which had
its origin in an epidemic among the cattle, enumerates children of 14,
12, 11, 10, 9, years of age; which in some degree reconciles one to the
fate of the fourteen canons, four gentlemen of the choir, two young men
of rank, a fat old lady of rank, the wife of a burgomaster, a
counsellor, the fattest burgess of Wartzburg, together with his wife,
the handsomest woman in the city, and a midwife of the name of
Schiekelte, with whom (according to an N.B. in the original report) the
whole mischief originated. To amateurs of executions in those days the
fatness of the victim was evidently a point of consideration, as is
shown by the specifications of that quality in some of the victims in
the above list. Were men devils _then_? By no means; there existed then
as now upon earth, worth, honour, truth, benevolence, gentleness. But
there were other ing