revenge:  and when came those sharp and shooting pains, the hags were thrusting in their bodkins, and their laugh rang in his ears:  they sat upon his breast asleep,—­he awoke gasping, and, as he started up, he saw them melting into air.  Yet more miserable was the wight whom the fiends were commissioned bodily to possess;—­with whose breathing frame an infernal substance was incorporate and almost identified;—­whose thoughts were sufferings, and his words involuntary blasphemies.  Can we wonder that all this was not borne passively;—­that its authors were hunted out, even, if needful, by their own charms;—­that suspicion grew into conviction, and conviction demanded vengeance;—­that it was deemed a duty to hold them up to public hatred, and drag them to the bar of public justice;—­and that their blood was eagerly thirsted after, of which the shedding was often believed not merely a righteous retribution, but the only efficient relief for the sufferers?

“The notion of witchcraft was no innocent and romantic superstition, no scion of an elegant mythology, but was altogether vulgar, repulsive, bloody, and loathsome.  It was a foul ulcer on the face of humanity.  Other vagaries of the mind have been associated with lofty or with gentle feelings;—­they have belonged more to sportiveness than to criminality;—­they are the poetry interspersed on the pages of the history of opinions;—­they seem to be dreams of sleeping reason, and not the putrescence of its mouldering carcase; but this has no bright side, no redeeming quality whatever."[39]

The human body is not more liable to contagion than is that faculty of the mind which is called imagination.  That many of the accused believed in their crime, we have sufficient evidence in their own voluntary confessions, as well as in the traditions handed down to us on this subject.  Both knavery and delusion were at work, as the following incidents will abundantly manifest.  They have been selected from a wide range of materials on this important topic, as illustrating the varied operations of the same delusion on different orders and grades of mind,—­the temptations warily suited to each disposition, all tending to the same crime, and ultimately to the same punishment.

Our lusty miller had no children:  it was a secret source of grief and anxiety to his dame, and many an hour of repining and discontent was the consequence.  Yet Giles Dickisson’s song was none the heavier; and if his wheel went merrily round, his spirits whirled with it, and danced and frolicked in the sunshine of good humour, like the spray and sparkle from his own mill-race.  But a change was gathering on his wife’s countenance:  her grief grew sullen; her aspect stern and forbidding:—­some hidden purpose was maturing:  she seldom spoke to her husband.  When addressed, she seemed to arouse from a sort of stupor, unwillingly forcing a reply.  “She is bewitched,” thought Giles.  He had his suspicions; but he could not confidently point out the source of the mischief.