bars laid upon her bare shins, her
feet being in the stocks, as in the case of Margaret Barclay.

She endured this torture with incredible firmness, since she did
"admirably, without any kind of din or exclamation, suffer above thirty
stone of iron to be laid on her legs, never shrinking thereat in any
sort, but remaining, as it were, steady." But in shifting the situation
of the iron bars, and removing them to another part of her shins, her
constancy gave way; she broke out into horrible cries (though not more
than three bars were then actually on her person) of--"Tak aff--tak
aff!" On being relieved from the torture, she made the usual confession
of all that she was charged with, and of a connexion with the devil
which had subsisted for several years. Sentence was given against her
accordingly. After this had been denounced, she openly denied all her
former confessions, and died without any sign of repentance, offering
repeated interruption to the minister in his prayer, and absolutely
refusing to pardon the executioner.

This tragedy happened in the year 1613, and recorded, as it is, very
particularly and at considerable length, forms the most detailed
specimen I have met with of a Scottish trial for
witchcraft--illustrating, in particular, how poor wretches, abandoned,
as they conceived, by God and the world, deprived of all human sympathy,
and exposed to personal tortures of an acute description, became
disposed to throw away the lives that were rendered bitter to them by a
voluntary confession of guilt, rather than struggle hopelessly against
so many evils. Four persons here lost their lives, merely because the
throwing some clay models into the sea, a fact told differently by the
witnesses who spoke of it, corresponded with the season, for no day was
fixed in which a particular vessel was lost. It is scarce possible that,
after reading such a story, a man of sense can listen for an instant to
the evidence founded on confessions thus obtained, which has been almost
the sole reason by which a few individuals, even in modern times, have
endeavoured to justify a belief in the existence of witchcraft.

The result of the judicial examination of a criminal, when extorted by
such means, is the most suspicious of all evidence, and even when
voluntarily given, is scarce admissible without the corroboration of
other testimony.

We might here take leave of our Scottish history of witchcraft by barely
mentioning that man