pkins
recommended that a hole be made in the door, through which her imps were
sure to come to be fed, and that her watchers be careful to kill
everything they saw--fly, spider, lice, mouse, what not; for none knew
when and under what form her familiars might appear; and if by any chance
they missed or could not kill them, then they might be sure that they were
imps, and so another proof be indisputably established. If neither of
these ways would do, then, still cross-bound, she was to be "swum." If she
sank, she was drowned; if she floated--and by putting her carefully on the
water she generally would float--then she was a witch, and to be taken out
and hung. For water, being the sacred element used in baptism, thus
manifestly refused to hold such an accursed thing as a witch within its
bosom; so that, when she swam, it was a proof that this "sacred element"
rejected her for the more potent keeping of the fire. This was the
explanation which, it seemed to King James the First, was a rational and
religious manner of accounting for a certain physical fact.

This, then, was the wise and liberal manner in which an impossible sin was
discovered, and judgment executed, in those fatal years when Matthew
Hopkins ruled the mind of England; yet years wherein Harvey was patiently
at work on his grand physiological discovery, and when Wallis, and
Wilkins, and Boyle were founding the Royal Society of liberal art and free
discussion. It was only a piece of poetical justice that in the future he
should be "swum" cross-bound in his own manner, and found to float
according to the hydrostatics of witches. The shame and fear of this trial
hastened the consumption to which he was hereditarily predisposed; and
after this stringent test we hear no more of this vile impostor and
impudent deceiver, this canting hypocrite, who cloaked his cruelty and
covetousness under the garb of religion, and professed to be serving God
and delivering man from the power of the devil when he was pandering to
the worst passions of the time, and sacrificing to his own corrupt heart.
The blood money, for which he sent so many hapless wretches to the gallows
(he charged twenty shillings a town for his labours), though not an
exceeding bribe, as he himself boasts, was money pleasantly earned and
pleasantly spent; for what man would object to travel through a beautiful
country, surrounded by friends, and carrying influence and importance
wherever he went, and have a