rent parts of the body. The cry of sorcery was raised,
and a young woman, named Maria Renata Sanger, was arrested on the
charge of having leagued with the devil, to bewitch five of the young
ladies. It was sworn on the trial that Maria had been frequently seen
to clamber over the convent walls in the shape of a pig--that,
proceeding to the cellar, she used to drink the best wine till she was
intoxicated; and then start suddenly up in her own form. Other girls
asserted that she used to prowl about the roof like a cat, and often
penetrate into their chamber, and frighten them by her dreadful
howlings. It was also said that she had been seen in the shape of a
hare, milking the cows dry in the meadows belonging to the convent;
that she used to perform as an actress on the boards of Drury Lane
theatre in London, and, on the very same night, return upon a
broomstick to Wurzburg, and afflict the young ladies with pains in all
their limbs. Upon this evidence she was condemned, and burned alive in
the market-place of Wurzburg.

Here ends this frightful catalogue of murder and superstition. Since
that day, the belief in witchcraft has fled from the populous abodes of
men, and taken refuge in remote villages and districts too wild,
rugged, and inhospitable to afford a resting-place for the foot of
civilization. Rude fishers and uneducated labourers still attribute
every phenomenon of nature which they cannot account for, to the devil
and witches. Catalepsy, that wondrous disease, is still thought by
ignorant gossips to be the work of Satan; and hypochondriacs,
uninformed by science of the nature of their malady, devoutly believe
in the reality of their visions. The reader would hardly credit the
extent of the delusion upon this subject in the very heart of England
at this day. Many an old woman leads a life of misery from the
unfeeling insults of her neighbours, who raise the scornful finger and
hooting voice at her, because in her decrepitude she is ugly, spiteful,
perhaps insane, and realizes in her personal appearance the description
preserved by tradition of the witches of yore. Even in the
neighbourhood of great towns the taint remains of this once
widely-spread contagion. If no victims fall beneath it, the
enlightenment of the law is all that prevents a recurrence of scenes as
horrid as those of the seventeeth century. Hundreds upon hundreds of
witnesses could be found to swear to absurdities as great as those
asserted by