ural or ecclesiastical
aberglaube of our ancestors, at the moment when witchcraft was
ceasing to be a recognised criminal offence.

A diary of Wodrow's exists, dating from April 3, 1697, when he was
but nineteen years of age. On June 10, 1697, he announces the
execution of some witches at Paisley: seven were burned, among them
one, Margaret Lang, who accused herself of horrible crimes. The
victim of the witches burned in 1697 was a child of eleven, daughter
of John Shaw of Bargarran. This family was unlucky in its spiritual
accidents. The previous laird, as we learn from the contemporary
Law, in his Memorialls, rode his horse into a river at night, and
did not arrive at the opposite bank. Every effort was made to find
his body in the stream, which was searched as far as the sea. The
corpse was at last discovered in a ditch, two miles away, shamefully
mutilated. The money of the laird, and other objects of value, were
still in his pockets. This was regarded as the work of fiends, but
there is a more plausible explanation. Nobody but his groom saw the
laird ride into the river; the chances are that he was murdered in
revenge,--certain circumstances point to this,--and that the servant
was obliged to keep the secret, and invent the story about riding
the ford.

The daughter of Bargarran's successor and heir was probably a
hysterical child, who was led, by the prevailing superstition, to
believe that witches caused her malady. How keen the apprehensions
were among children, we learn from a document preserved by Wodrow.
An eminent Christian of his acquaintance thought in boyhood that an
old woman looked crossly at him, and he went in dread of being
bewitched for a whole summer. The mere terror might have caused
fits, he would then have denounced the old woman, and she would
probably have been burned. Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, in his
preface to Law's Memorialls (p. xcii.), says that Miss Shaw was
'antient in wickedness,' and thus accounts for her 'pretending to be
bewitched,' by way of revenging herself on one of the maid-servants.
Twenty people were finally implicated, several were executed, and
one killed himself. The child, probably hysterical, and certainly
subject to convulsions, was really less to blame than 'the absurd
credulity of various otherwise worthy ministers, and some topping
professors in and about Glasgow,' as Sharpe quotes the MS. 'Treatise
on witchcraft' of the Rev. Mr. Bell. Strangely e