r performed. Wratislaus gave battle, lost it, and was
killed. The young soldier escaped; but on entering his house, he found
that it was his wife whom he had killed and run his sword through, and
whose ears he had cut off.

This woman was, then, strangely disguised and metamorphosed, since
her husband could not recognize her, and she did not make herself
known to him in such perilous circumstances, when her life was in
danger. These two were, then, apparently magicians; both she who made
the prediction, and the other on whom it was exercised. God permits,
on this occasion, three great evils. The first magician counsels the
murder of an innocent person; the young man commits it on his own wife
without knowing her; and the latter dies in a state of condemnation,
since by the secrets of magic she had rendered it impossible to
recognize her.

A butcher's wife of the town of Jena, in the duchy of Wiemar in
Thuringia,[166] having refused to let an old woman have a calf's head
for which she offered very little, the old woman went away grumbling
and muttering. A little time after this the butcher's wife felt
violent pains in her head. As the cause of this malady was unknown to
the cleverest physicians, they could find no remedy for it; from time
to time a substance like brains came from this woman's left ear, and
at first it was supposed to be her own brain. But as she suspected
that old woman of having cast a spell upon her on account of the
calf's head, they examined the thing more minutely, and they saw that
these were calf's brains; and what strengthened this opinion was that
splinters of calf's-head bones came out with the brains. This disorder
continued some time; at last the butcher's wife was perfectly cured.
This happened in 1685. M. Hoffman, who relates this story in his
dissertation _on the Power of the Demon over Bodies_, printed in 1736,
says that the woman was perhaps still alive.

One day they brought to St. Macarius the Egyptian, a virtuous woman
who had been transformed into a mare by the pernicious arts of a
magician. Her husband, and all those who saw her, thought that she
really was changed into a mare. This woman remained three days and
three nights without tasting any food, proper either for man or horse.
They showed her to the priests of the place, who could apply no
remedy.

Then they led her to the cell of St. Macarius, to whom God had
revealed that she was to come; his disciples wanted to send her