being the cry extorted by that further pang.
When able to speak, he procured relief by
confessing as much as would satisfy his tormentors.
The next day he recanted this confession. He
was then somewhat restored to himself, and had
mastered Ihe weakness of his agony. Whereupon
it was assumed that the devil had visited
him in the night and had marked him afresh.
They searched him, he was tortured afresh, and
died denying all the fictions charged against
him. Fian was one of the first human sacrifices
to the odious superstition of the odious King
James.

Another was the half-witted servant-girl of
a deputy baillie, who, seeing his maid busy to
"helpe all such as were troubled or grieved
with anie kinde of sicknes or infirmitie,"
considered this conduct suspicious, and, without
witness, judge, or jury, put her to torture on
his own account, first with the "pillie-winks,"
or thumbscrews, then by "thrawing," binding,
and wrenching her head with a rope. As she
confessed nothing, she was searched by pricking
with a pin, and the devil's mark was discovered
on her throat. The point of discovery was the
prick made when her endurance gave way; and
she not only confessed, but implicated by her
confession three other women, one of them the
daughter of Lord Cliftonhall, one of the senators
of the College of Justice. While we dip
into Mrs. Linton's work, selecting and
condensing, we use, as far as we can, the clever
lady's own words, for it is hardly desirable
that what is well said should be said worse.
One of the women thus accused, Agnes Sampson,
was a sober clever woman, whose repute
for wisdom brought her to the mind of her
accuser. She was carried before the king
himself at Holyrood, and, as she denied all that was
charged against her, she was fastened to the
witch's bridle: an iron machine pressed over the
head with a piece of iron thrust into the mouth,
having four prongs, directed one to the tongue,
one to the palate, one to either cheek; was
kept without sleep, had her head shaved, and
thrawn with a rope; was searched and pricked,
until she was goaded into edifying the royal
inquisitor with such tales as he longed to hear.
"She said," writes Mrs. Linton, "that she and
two hundred other witches went to sea on
All-Halloween, in riddles or sieves, making merry
and drinking by the way: that they landed at
North Berwick church, where, taking hands,
they danced around, saying,

  Commer goe ye before! commer goe ye!
   Gif ye will not goe before, commer let me!

Here they met the devil, like a mickle black
man, as John Fian had said, and he marked her
on the right knee; and this was the time when
he made them all so angry by calling Robert
Grierson by his right name, instead of Rob the
Rower, or Ro' the Comptroller. When they
rifled the graves, as Fian had said, she got two
joints, a winding-sheet, and an enchanted ring,
for love-charms. She also said that Geillis
Duncan, the informer, went before them playing
on the jew's-harp, and the dance she played was
Gyllatripes; which so delighted gracious
majesty, greedy of infernal news, that he sent on
the instant to Geillis, to play the same tune
before him; which she did 'to his great pleasure
and amazement.' Furthermore, Agnes Sampson
confessed that, on asking Satan why he hated
King James, and so greatly wished to destroy
him, the foul fiend answered: 'Because he is
the greatest enemy I have;' adding, that he
was 'un homme de Dieu,' and that Satan had
no power against him. A pretty piece of flattery,
but availing the poor wise wife nothing as
time went on."

We pass over some years in Mrs. Linton's
chronological series, and, in the middle of the
seventeenth century, find many wretched women
seized, tortured, and roasted on the accusation
of a poor maniac. This wretched creature was
a certain Hob Grieve, whose wife had been
burnt for a witch twenty years before, and who
was himself now doomed as a wizard. Even
before torture, when he had filled a prison with
his victims, one woman who had been accused
by him, came, stung with wrath, to contradict
and curse him, and at last in frenzy turned upon
herself. Another poor woman, whom the
magistrates really laboured to save, sought death as
the desperate remedy for all the wretchedness
that a mere accusation brought with it. "She
had been fyled as a witch, she said, and as a
witch she would die. And had not the devil
once, when she was a young lassie, kissed her,
and given her a new name? Reason enough
why she should die, if even nothing worse lay
behind. At last the day of her execution came,
and she was taken out to be burnt with the rest.
On her way to the scaffold she made this
lamentable speech: 'Now all you that see me this
day, know that I am now to die a witch by my
own confession; and I free all men, especially
the ministers and magistrates, of the guilt of my
blood. I take it wholly on myself. My blood
be upon my own head; and as I must make
answer to the God of heaven presently, I declare
I am as free of witchcraft as any child; but
being delated by a malicious woman, and put
in prison under the name of a witch, disowned
by my husband and friends, and seeing no ground
of hope of my coming out of prison or ever
coming in credit again, through a temptation of
the devil I made up that confession on purpose
to destroy my own life, being weary of it, and
choosing rather to die than to live.'"

England, even when represented by much of
its best wit, was not before Scotland in these
matters. As Mr. Crossley has said with only
too much truth in the introduction to an old
volume on the Discovery of Witches, edited by
him: "We find the illustrious author of the
Novum Organum sacrificing to courtly
suppleness his philosophic truth, and gravely prescribing
the ingredients for a witch's ointment;
Selden maintaining that crimes of the imagination
may be punished with death; the detector
of Vulgar Errors, and the most humane of
physicians giving the casting vote to the vacillating