Marget was enduring her forsakenness and isolation fairly well, all things considered, and was cheerful, by help of Wilhelm Meidling.  She spent an hour or two every night in the jail with her uncle, and had fattened him up with the cat’s contributions.  But she was curious to know more about Philip Traum, and hoped I would bring him again.  Ursula was curious about him herself, and asked a good many questions about his uncle.  It made the boys laugh, for I had told them the nonsense Satan had been stuffing her with.  She got no satisfaction out of us, our tongues being tied.

Ursula gave us a small item of information:  money being plenty now, she had taken on a servant to help about the house and run errands.  She tried to tell it in a commonplace, matter-of-course way, but she was so set up by it and so vain of it that her pride in it leaked out pretty plainly.  It was beautiful to see her veiled delight in this grandeur, poor old thing, but when we heard the name of the servant we wondered if she had been altogether wise; for although we were young, and often thoughtless, we had fairly good perception on some matters.  This boy was Gottfried Narr, a dull, good creature, with no harm in him and nothing against him personally; still, he was under a cloud, and properly so, for it had not been six months since a social blight had mildewed the family —­his grandmother had been burned as a witch.  When that kind of a malady is in the blood it does not always come out with just one burning.  Just now was not a good time for Ursula and Marget to be having dealings with a member of such a family, for the witch-terror had risen higher during the past year than it had ever reached in the memory of the oldest villagers.  The mere mention of a witch was almost enough to frighten us out of our wits.  This was natural enough, because of late years there were more kinds of witches than there used to be; in old times it had been only old women, but of late years they were of all ages—­even children of eight and nine; it was getting so that anybody might turn out to be a familiar of the Devil—­age and sex hadn’t anything to do with it.  In our little region we had tried to extirpate the witches, but the more of them we burned the more of the breed rose up in their places.

Once, in a school for girls only ten miles away, the teachers found that the back of one of the girls was all red and inflamed, and they were greatly frightened, believing it to be the Devil’s marks.  The girl was scared, and begged them not to denounce her, and said it was only fleas; but of course it would not do to let the matter rest there.  All the girls were examined, and eleven out of the fifty were badly marked, the rest less so.  A commission was appointed, but the eleven only cried for their mothers and would not confess.  Then they were shut up, each by herself, in the dark, and put on black bread and water for ten days and nights; and by that time they were haggard and wild, and their