hollows, and along the course of its gurgling streams.  He who visits Pendle[31] will yet find that charms are generally resorted to amongst the lower classes; that there are hares which, in their persuasion, never can be caught, and which survive only to baffle and confound the huntsman; that each small hamlet has its peculiar and gifted personage, whom it is dangerous to offend; that the wise man and wise woman (the white witches of our ancestors) still continue their investigations of truth, undisturbed by the rural police or the progress of the schoolmaster; that each locality has its haunted house; that apparitions still walk their ghostly rounds—­and little would his reputation for piety avail that clergyman in the eyes of his parishioners who should refuse to lay those “extravagant and erring spirits,” when requested, by those due liturgic ceremonies which the orthodoxy of tradition requires.

[Footnote 31:  It was my good fortune to visit this wizard-haunted spot within the last few weeks, in company with the able and zealous Archdeacon[A] within whose ecclesiastical cure it is comprized, and to whose singularly accurate knowledge of this district, and courteous communication of much valuable information regarding it, I hold myself greatly indebted.  Following, with unequal steps, such a guide, accompanied, likewise, by an excellent Canon of the Church[B] with all the “armamentaria coeli” at command against the powers of darkness, and a lay auxiliary[C], whose friendly converse would make the roughest journey appear smooth, I need scarcely say, I passed through

                          “The forest wyde,
    Whose hideous horror and sad trembling sownd
    Full griesly seem’d,”

unscathed by the old lords of the soil, and needed not Mengus’s Fuga, Fustis et Flagellum Daemonum, as a triple coat of mail.]

[Footnote A:  The Venerable the Archdeacon of Manchester, the Rev. John Rushton, who is also the Incumbent of New Church, in Pendle.]

[Footnote B:  The Rev. Canon Parkinson.]

[Footnote C:  J.B.  Wanklyn, Esq.]

In the early part of the reign of James the first, and at the period when his execrable statute against witchcraft might have been sharpening its appetite by a temporary fast for the full meal of blood by which it was eventually glutted,—­for as yet it could count no recorded victims,—­two wretched old women with their families resided in the Forest of Pendle.  Their names were Elizabeth Southernes and Ann Whittle, better known, perhaps, in the chronicles of witchcraft, by the appellations of Old Demdike and Old Chattox.[32] Both had attained, or had reached the verge of the advanced age of eighty, were evidently in a state of extreme poverty, subsisting with their families by occasional employment, by mendicancy, but principally, perhaps, by the assumption of that unlawful power, which commerce with spirits of evil was supposed to procure, and of which their sex, life,