's hearts, or opening their eyes
to the infamy into which their superstition dragged them; for still the
witch trials went on, and the young and the old, and the beautiful and the
unlovely, and the loved and the loveless, were equally victims, cast
without pity or remorse to their frightful doom.

Sixteen hundred and sixteen was a fruitful year for the witch-finders.
There was Jonka Dyneis of Shetland,[20] who, offended with one Olave, fell
out in most vile cursings and blasphemous exclamations, saying that within
a few days his bones should be "raiking" about the banks: and as she
predicted so did it turn out--Olave perishing by her sorcery and
enchantments. And not content with this, she cursed the other son of the
poor widowed mother, and in fourteen days he also died, to Jonka's own
undoing when the Shetlanders would bear her iniquities no longer. And
there was Katherine Jonesdochter, also of Shetland, who cruelly
transferred her husband's natural infirmities to a stranger: and Elspeth
Reoch of Orkney, who pulled the herb called melefowr (millfoil?) betwixt
her finger and thumb, saying, "In Nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus
Sancti," thus curing men's distempers in a devilish and unwholesome
manner: and Agnes Scottie, who refused to speak word to living man before
passing "the boundis of hir ground, and their sat down, plaiting her feit
betwixt the merchis," that a certain woman might have a good childbirth;
who was also convicted "of washing the inner nuke of her plaid and
aprone," for some wicked and sinister purpose; for what sane Scottish
woman would wash her clothes more than was absolutely necessary? and who
could curse as well as cure, and transfer as well as give the sickness she
could heal: and Marable Couper who threw a "wall piet" at a man who spoke
ill of her, and made his face bleed, so that he went mad, and could only
be recovered by her laying her hands on him, whereby he received his
senses and his health again: and Agnes Yullock, who went to the guid wyfe
of Langskaill, and by touching her gave her back her health: and William
Gude, who had power over all inanimate things, and by his touch could give
them back the virtue they had lost. These are only a few, very few, of the
cases to be found in the various judiciary records of the year 1616--a
year no worse than others, and no better, where all were bad and
blood-stained alike.

In 1618 one of the saddest stories of all was to be read in the tears of