party of soldiers. On her approach to the town, she was,
unfortunately, met by a furious mob, composed principally of fishermen
and their wives, who seized upon her with the intention of swimming
her. They forced her away to the sea shore, and tying a rope around her
body, secured the end of it to the mast of a fishing-boat lying
alongside. In this manner they ducked her several times. When she was
half dead, a sailor in the boat cut away the rope, and the mob dragged
her through the sea to the beach. Here, as she lay quite insensible, a
brawny ruffian took down the door of his hut, close by, and placed it
on her back. The mob gathered large stones from the beach, and piled
them upon her till the wretched woman was pressed to death. No
magistrate made the slightest attempt to interfere, and the soldiers
looked on, delighted spectators. A great outcry was raised against this
culpable remissness, but no judicial inquiry was set on foot. This
happened in 1704.

The next case we hear of is that of Elspeth Rule, found guilty of
witchcraft before Lord Anstruther at the Dumfries circuit, in 1708.
She was sentenced to be marked in the cheek with a redhot iron, and
banished the realm of Scotland for life.

Again there is a long interval. In 1718, the remote county of
Caithness, where the delusion remained in all its pristine vigour for
years after it had ceased elsewhere, was startled from its propriety by
the cry of witchcraft. A silly fellow, named William Montgomery, a
carpenter, had a mortal antipathy to cats, and, somehow or other, these
animals generally chose his back-yard as the scene of their
catterwaulings. He puzzled his brains for a long time to know why he,
above all his neighbours, should be so pestered; at last he came to the
sage conclusion that his tormentors were no cats, but witches. In this
opinion he was supported by his maid-servant, who swore a round oath
that she had often heard the aforesaid cats talking together in human
voices. The next time the unlucky tabbies assembled in his back-yard,
the valiant carpenter was on the alert. Arming himself with an axe, a
dirk, and a broadsword, he rushed out among them: one of them he
wounded in the back, a second in the hip, and the leg of a third he
maimed with his axe; but he could not capture any of them. A few days
afterwards, two old women of the parish died, and it was said that,
when their bodies were laid out, there appeared upon the back of one
the mark