were set there to seek.

Suddenly there appeared a notice that certain and various witches were to
be ducked at Longmarston the 22nd day of April. A crowd assembled at Tring
to watch the sport; and but one thought went through that crowd--the
Osbornes were to be the ducked witches, and the sport they would have
would be rare. The parish officers had taken the old couple into the
workhouse for safety, but the mob broke through the gates, and crushed
down the doors, and searched the whole place through, from end to end,
even to the salt box, "lest the witch should have made herself little,"
and have hidden in the corners. But they could not find her, not even
there; so, in a rage, they broke the windows, smashed the furniture, and
then heaped up straw high against the house, threatening to burn it down,
and every living soul within it, if the Osbornes were not given up them.
The master was frightened; he had never faced such a scene before, and his
nerve forsook him--not unreasonably. He brought the old people from their
hiding place, and gave them up to that wild, tossing, furious mob. In a
moment they were stripped stark naked, then cross-bound in the prescribed
manner, wrapped loosely in a sheet, and dragged two miles along the road
to a small pond or river, where with many a curse and many a kick they
were thrown in, to prove whether they were witches or not. A chimney
sweeper, called Colley, was the most active of the crew. Seeing that
Mother Osborne did not sink, he waded into the water and turned her over
with his stick. She slipped out of the sheet, and thus lay exposed, naked,
and half choked with mud, before the brutal crowd, who saw nothing
pitiful, and nothing shameful, in her state. After a time they dragged her
out, flung her on the bank, and kicked and beat her till she died. Her
husband died also, but not on the spot. The man who had arranged this rare
diversion then went round among the crowd collecting money in return for
his amusement. But government took the matter up. A coroner's inquest was
held, and a verdict of wilful murder returned against Colley, the chimney
sweep, who, much to his own surprise and the indignation of the
people--many ranking him as a martyr--was hanged by the neck till he was
dead, for the murder of the witch of Tring, poor old Ruth Osborne. The act
against witchcraft, under colour and favour of which all the judicial
murders had been done, had been repealed a few years before, n