The judges settled themselves to closer attention.  The hush of listening folk broadened to the utmost limits of the great hall.  At a whisper or a cough a hundred threatening faces were turned in the direction of the sound, so strained was the attention of the people and such the fear of the eloquence of this most famous pleader in all Germany.  In these days when learning has reached so great a pitch, and is so general that in a largish city there may be as many as a thousand people who can read and write, of course there are many eloquent men.  But in those days it was not so, and Grerard von Sturm was counted the one Golden Mouth of the Wolfmark.

And this in brief was the matter of his speech.  The manner and the persuasive grace I cannot attempt to give: 

“It has at all times been a received opinion of the wise that witchcraft is a thing truly practised—­by which such women as the Witch of Endor in Holy Writ were able to call dead men out of their deep graves grown with grass; or, as in that famous case of Demarchaus, who, having by the advice of such a woman tasted the flesh of a sacrificed child, was immediately turned into a wolf.

“Further, the testimony-of Scripture is clear:  ’Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’; and, again, as sayeth the Wise Man, ’Thou hast hated them, 0 God, because with enchantments they did horrible works.’

“Now, men may by conspicuous bravery guard their lives against assault by the sword of the enemy, against the spear of the invader that cometh over the wall, even against the knife of the assassin.  But who shall be able to keep out witchcraft?  It moveth in the motes of the mid-day sun.  It comes stealing into the room on the pale beams of the moon.  Witchcraft rides in the hurtling blast, and shrieks in the gust which shakes the roof and blows awry the candle in the hall.

“Enchantment can summon Azazeli, the Lord of Flesh and Blood, called in another place the Lord of the Desert, by whose spiriting of the elements even the pure water of the spring or the juice of the purple grape may become noxious as the brew of the serpent’s poison-bag.

“Of such a sort was the ill-doing of this woman.  For her own hellish purposes she desired and compassed the death of the most noble Duke Casimir.  There may be those who try to discover a motive for such an act.  But in this they do foolishly.  For to those who have studied of this matter, as I have done, it is well known that enchanters and witches ever attack those who are the greatest, the noblest, and the most envied—­not hoping for any good to result to themselves, but out of pure malice and envy, being prompted by the devil in order that the great and noble should be destroyed out of the land.  Well was it spoken then, ’Ye shall not suffer a witch to live!’