ws straight before her, and this desperate plea
perhaps able to save her--"no; it shall never be said that I was both
Witch and ----." She died with the same haughty courage maintained to the
last: but old mother Samuel maundered through a vast number of
confessions--implicated her husband--confessed to her spirits--but with
one affecting touch of nature, through all her drivel and imbecility
steadily refused to criminate her daughter. No, her Nan was no witch; she
was clear and pure before God and towards man; and neither force nor
cajolery could make her forswear that bit of loving truth.

When those three helpless wretches were fairly dead, the children, upon
whose young souls lay the ineffaceable stain of Murder, and whose first
steps in life had been through innocent blood, gave up the game and
pronounced themselves cured: so we hear no more of their fits or their
spirits, or Mrs. Joan's ghostly lovers fighting with cowl staves and
breaking each other's heads out of jealousy and revenge: and the last
record of the case is, that Sir Henry Cromwell left an annual sum of forty
shillings to provide for a yearly sermon against witchcraft, to be
preached at Huntingdon by a B.D. or D.D. member of Queen's College,
Cambridge. How terrible to think that three human lives were sacrificed
for such wild and wilful nonsense, and that sane and thoughtful and
noble-minded people of this present day walk on the way towards the same
faith! Better by far the most chill and desolate scepticism, which at
least will light no Smithfield fires for any forms of creed or monstrous
imaginings of superstition, than beliefs which can only be expressed and
maintained by blood, and the culmination of which is in the suffering and
destruction of all dissentients.

THE MAN OF HOPE AND THE DEVIL.[108]

A young lawyer, a Mr. Darrel, had a call to the ministry. He was made
aware of this by the extraordinary sluggishness that came upon him when he
turned to open a law book; so, as preaching puritanical sermons extempore
was less toilsome and cost less study than learning the intricacies of the
Codex Anglicanus, he became converted to extreme doctrines, and was
principally regarded as a Man of Hope, skilful in casting out devils and
marvellously apt at discovering witchcraft. His first essay at this work
was in 1587 with Katherine Green, a young girl of seventeen, who had some
hysterical affection which caused her to swell to an enormous size and le