ilar trade in the neighbourhood of Tunbridge
Wells about the year 1830. He had been in practice for several years, and
charged enormous fees for his advice. This fellow pretended to be the
seventh son of a seventh son, and to be endowed in consequence with
miraculous powers for the cure of all diseases, but especially of those
resulting from witchcraft. It was not only the poor who employed him, but
ladies who rode in their carriages. He was often sent for from a distance
of sixty or seventy miles by these people, who paid all his expenses to
and fro, besides rewarding him handsomely. He was about eighty years of
age, and his extremely venerable appearance aided his imposition in no
slight degree. His name was Okey or Oakley.

In France, the superstition at this day is even more prevalent than it is
in England. Garinet, in his history of Magic and Sorcery in that country,
cites upwards of twenty instances which occurred between the years 1805
and 1818. In the latter year no less than three tribunals were occupied
with trials originating in this humiliating belief: we shall cite only one
of them. Julian Desbourdes, aged fifty-three, a mason, and inhabitant of
the village of Thilouze, near Bourdeaux, was taken suddenly ill, in the
month of January 1818. As he did not know how to account for his malady,
he suspected at last that he was bewitched. He communicated this suspicion
to his son-in-law Bridier, and they both went to consult a sort of idiot,
named Baudouin, who passed for a conjuror or _white-witch_. This man told
them that Desbourdes was certainly bewitched, and offered to accompany
them to the house of an old man named Renard, who, he said, was
undoubtedly the criminal. On the night of the 23d of January all three
proceeded stealthily to the dwelling of Renard, and accused him of
afflicting persons with diseases by the aid of the devil. Desbourdes fell
on his knees and earnestly entreated to be restored to his former health,
promising that he would take no measures against him for the evil he had
done. The old man denied in the strongest terms that he was a wizard; and
when Desbourdes still pressed him to remove the spell from him, he said he
knew nothing about the spell, and refused to remove it. The idiot
Baudouin, the _white-witch_, now interfered, and told his companions that
no relief for the malady could ever be procured until the old man
confessed his guilt. To force him to confession they lighted some stick