were then in prison awaiting their trial. Sir
George stated that there was no evidence against them whatever but
their own confessions, which were absurd and contradictory, and drawn
from them by severe torture. They were immediately discharged.

For the next sixteen years, the Lords of Session were unoccupied with
trials for witchcraft; not one is entered upon the record: but in 1697,
a case occurred, which equalled in absurdity any of those that
signalized the dark reign of King James. A girl, named Christiana Shaw,
eleven years of age, the daughter of John Shaw of Bargarran, was
subject to fits, and being of a spiteful temper, she accused her
maid-servant, with whom she had frequent quarrels, of bewitching her.
Her story, unfortunately, was believed. Encouraged to tell all the
persecutions of the devil which the maid had sent to torment her, she
in the end concocted a romance that involved twenty-one persons. There
was no other evidence against them but the fancies of this lying child,
and the confessions which pain had extorted from them; but upon this no
less than five women were condemned, before Lord Blantyre and the rest
of the Commissioners, appointed specially by the Privy Council to try
this case. They were burned on the Green at Paisley. The warlock of
the party, one John Reed, who was also condemned, hanged himself in
prison. It was the general belief in Paisley that the devil had
strangled him, lest he should have revealed in his last moments too
many of the unholy secrets of witchcraft. This trial excited
considerable disgust in Scotland. The Rev. Mr. Bell, a contemporary
writer, observed that, in this business, "persons of more goodness and
esteem than most of their calumniators were defamed for witches." He
adds, that the persons chiefly to blame were "certain ministers of too
much forwardness and absurd credulity, and some topping professors in
and about Glasgow." [Preface to "Law's Memorials," edited by Sharpe.]

After this trial, there again occurs a lapse of seven years, when the
subject was painfully forced upon public attention by the brutal
cruelty of the mob at Pittenween. Two women were accused of having
bewitched a strolling beggar, who was subject to fits, or who pretended
to be so, for the purpose of exciting commiseration. They were cast
into prison, and tortured until they confessed. One of them, named
Janet Cornfoot, contrived to escape, but was brought back to Pittenween
next day by a