ers, "that the present Lord Torphichen
(1860) is only _nephew_ to the witch-boy of Calder."

THE LAST OF THE WITCHES.

And now we draw near to the close of this fatal superstition. In 1726,
Woodrow notes "some pretty odd accounts of witches," had from a couple of
Ross-shire men, but fails to give us very accurate details, save only that
one of them at her death "confessed that they had, by sorcery, taken away
the sight of one of the eyes of an Episcopal minister, who lost the sight
of his eye upon a sudden, and could give no reason for it." And early in
the year of 1727[78] the last witch-fire was kindled with which the air of
bonnie Scotland was polluted. Two poor Highland women, a mother and
daughter, were brought before Captain David Ross of Littledean,
deputy-sheriff of Sutherland, charged with witchcraft and consorting with
the devil. The mother was accused of having used her daughter as her
"horse and hattock," causing her to be shod by the devil, so that she was
ever after lame in both hands and feet; and the fact being satisfactorily
proved, and Captain David Ross being well assured of the same, the poor
old woman was put into a tar-barrel and burned at Dornoch in the bright
month of June. "And it is said that after being brought out to execution,
the weather proving very severe, she sat composedly warming herself by the
fire prepared to consume her, while the other instruments of death were
getting ready." The daughter escaped: afterwards she married and had a son
who was as lame as herself; and lame in the same manner too; though it
does not seem that he was ever shod by the devil and witch-ridden. "And
this son," says Sir Walter Scott, in 1830, "was living so lately as to
receive the charity of the present Marchioness of Stafford, Countess of
Sutherland in her own right."

This, then, is the last execution for witchcraft in Scotland; and in June,
1736, the Acts Anentis Witchcraft were formally repealed. Henceforth, to
the dread of the timid, and the anger of the pious, the English
Parliament distinctly opposed the express letter of the Law of God, "Thou
shalt not suffer a witch to live;" and declared the text upon which so
much critical absurdity had been talked, and in support of which so much
innocent blood had been shed, vain, superstitious, impossible, and
contrary to that human reason which is the highest law of God hitherto
revealed unto men. But if Parliament could stay executions it could not
remo