19th Psalms every day, or the
cure would not be effectual. The fee which he claimed for this advice
was a guinea.

So efficacious is faith in the cure of any malady, that the patient
actually felt much better after a three weeks' course of this
prescription. The notable charm which the quack had given was
afterwards opened, and found to be a piece of parchment, covered with
some cabalistic characters and signs of the planets.

The next-door neighbours were in great alarm that the witch-doctor
would, on the solicitation of the recovering patient, employ some means
to punish them for their pretended witchcraft. To escape the
infliction, they feed another cunning man, in Nottinghamshire, who told
them of a similar charm, which would preserve them from all the malice
of their enemies. The writer concludes by saying that, "the doctor, not
long after he had been thus consulted, wrote to say that he had
discovered that his patient was not afflicted by Satan, as he had
imagined, but by God, and would continue, more or less, in the same
state till his life's end."

An impostor carried on a similar trade in the neighbourhood of
Tunbridge Wells, about the year 1830. He had been in practice for
several years, and charged enormous fees for his advice. This fellow
pretended to be the seventh son of a seventh son, and to be endowed in
consequence with miraculous powers for the cure of all diseases, but
especially of those resulting from witchcraft. It was not only the poor
who employed him, but ladies who rode in their carriages. He was often
sent for from a distance of sixty or seventy miles by these people, who
paid all his expenses to and fro, besides rewarding him handsomely. He
was about eighty years of age, and his extremely venerable appearance
aided his imposition in no slight degree. His name was Okey, or Oakley.

In France, the superstition at this day is even more prevalent than it
is in England. Garinet, in his history of Magic and Sorcery in that
country, cites upwards of twenty instances which occurred between the
years 1805 and 1818. In the latter year, no less than three tribunals
were occupied with trials originating in this humiliating belief: we
shall cite only one of them. Julian Desbourdes, aged fifty-three, a
mason, and inhabitant of the village of Thilouze, near Bordeaux, was
taken suddenly ill, in the month of January 1818. As he did not know
how to account for his malady, he suspected at last that he was