ch of St. Antonio, was seen, on rising from his knees, to wipe
with the skirt of his cloak the stool on which he was about to sit down. A
cry was raised immediately that he was besmearing the seat with poison. A
mob of women, by whom the church was crowded, seized hold of the feeble
old man, and dragged him out by the hair of his head, with horrid oaths
and imprecations. He was trailed in this manner through the mire to the
house of the municipal judge, that he might be put to the rack, and forced
to discover his accomplices; but he expired on the way. Many other victims
were sacrificed to the popular fury. One Mora, who appears to have been
half a chemist and half a barber, was accused of being in league with the
Devil to poison Milan. His house was surrounded, and a number of chemical
preparations were found. The poor man asserted, that they were intended as
preservatives against infection; but some physicians, to whom they were
submitted, declared they were poison, Mora was put to the rack, where he
for a long time asserted his innocence. He confessed at last, when his
courage was worn down by torture, that he was in league with the Devil and
foreign powers to poison the whole city; that he had anointed the doors,
and infected the fountains of water. He named several persons as his
accomplices, who were apprehended and put to a similar torture. They were
all found guilty, and executed. Mora's house was rased to the ground, and
a column erected on the spot, with an inscription to commemorate his
guilt.

While the public mind was filled with these marvellous occurrences, the
plague continued to increase. The crowds that were brought together to
witness the executions spread the infection among one another. But the
fury of their passions, and the extent of their credulity, kept pace with
the violence of the plague; every wonderful and preposterous story was
believed. One, in particular, occupied them to the exclusion, for a long
time, of every other. The Devil himself had been seen. He had taken a
house in Milan, in which he prepared his poisonous unguents, and furnished
them to his emissaries for distribution. One man had brooded over such
tales till he became firmly convinced that the wild nights of his own
fancy were realities. He stationed himself in the market-place of Milan,
and related the following story to the crowds that gathered round him. He
was standing, he said, at the door of the cathedral, late in the even