they were to
bewitch their noble enemies to death. And first, to try the potency of the
charm, Master John took a long leaden pin, and struck it two inches deep
into the forehead of the image representing Richard de Lowe, upon which
Richard was found writhing and in great pain, screaming "harrow!" and
having no knowledge of any man; and so he languished for some days. Then
Master John drew out the leaden pin from the brow, and struck it into the
heart of the image, when immediately Richard de Lowe died, as any number
of witnesses could testify. The necromancer and his man, and the
twenty-seven Coventry men implicated in this bit of sorcery, were tried
at common law, and acquitted for want of evidence.

That same year, too, occurred one of the most picturesque trials for
witchcraft known: the trial of Dame Alice Kyteler, which Mr. Wright, with
so much industry and learning, has exhumed from the dusty old records
where it was buried, and set out into the light of present knowledge and
apprehension. But Dame Alice was an Irishwoman, and so does not rightly
come into a book on English witches; else it would be a pleasant, if sad,
labour to tell how she was arrested on the charge of holding nightly
conferences with her spirit or familiar, Artisson, who was sometimes a
cat, and sometimes a black shaggy dog, and sometimes a black man with two
tall black companions, each carrying an iron rod in his hand--to which
fiendish Proteus she had sacrificed, in the highway, nine red cocks, and
nine peacocks' eyes; and also for having, between complines and twilight,
raked all the filth of Kilkenny streets to the doors of her son-in-law
William Outlawe, murmuring to herself--

"To the house of William, my sonne,
Hie all the wealth of Kilkennie towne."

Of how, too, she blasphemously travestied the holy sacrament, having a
wafer with the Devil's name stamped on it instead of Christ's; and how she
had a pipe of ointment wherewith she greased a staff "upon which she
ambolled and gallopped thorough thicke and thin, when and what manner she
listed." But it does not belong to my present subject: nor to tell how one
of her accomplices, poor weak Petronilla de Meath, was burnt at Kilkenny,
not having strength or courage to resist the monstrous confession forced
upon her; but how the other, Basil, escaped, according to the natural law
by which the strongest always come off the best. Perhaps the fact that
Dame Alice took refuge in England m