lear case as this?

Another woman was hanged at Oxford for a story as wild as any to be found
in Grimm or Mother Bunch. There were two sisters, left orphans but well
provided for. The eldest, somewhat prodigal, married a man as bad or
worse than herself, who spent her money and afterwards deserted her,
leaving her with one child and in extreme poverty. The younger, being very
serious and religious, waited for two or three years before she settled
herself, then married a good, honest, sober farmer, with whom she lived
well and prosperously; her gear increasing yearly, and herself the happy
mother of a pretty child. Her sister was moved to envy to see all this
prosperity and contentment, and in her passion made a compact with the
devil, by which she became a witch for the purpose of killing her sister's
child as the greatest despite she could do them. For this purpose she used
to mount a bedstaff, which, by the uttering of certain magical words,
carried her to her sister's room; but she could never harm the child,
because it was so well protected by the prayers of its parents. Her own
daughter, a little one of about seven, watched her mother in her antics
with the bedstaff, and from watching took to imitating--going through the
air one night after its dame, and in like fashion. However, it chanced
that she was left behind in her uncle's house; so presently she fell
a-crying, her powers being apparently limited to going, not including the
magic words that insured the return. Her uncle and aunt, hearing a child
cry where never a child should be, took a candle and discovered the whole
matter. Next day the child was taken before the magistrate, to whom it
told its tale, and the mother was apprehended. On the trial this little
creature of seven years old was admitted as the chief evidence against her
mother; and after they had made the poor woman mad among them, she
confessed, and was hanged quite quietly. These were only two out of the
hundreds whom that miserable man, Matthew Hopkins, gent., contrived to
send to the gallows. Beaumont, in his Treatise on Spirits, mentions that
"thirty-six were arraigned at the same time before Judge Coniers, An.
1645, and fourteen of them hanged, and an hundred more detained in several
prisons in Suffolk and Essex." But the most celebrated and the saddest of
all the trials in which Hopkins played a part was that of

THE MANNINGTREE WITCHES,

held before Sir Matthew Hale in 1645--Hopkins's