bigotry of Sir Matthew Hale; Hobbes, ever
sceptical, penetrating, and sagacious, yet here
paralysed and shrinking from the subject, as if
afraid to touch it; the adventurous explorer,
who sounded the depths and channels of the
'Intellectual System' along all the 'wide-watered'
shores of antiquity, running after witches to hear
them recite the Common Prayer and the Creed,
as a rational test of guilt or innocence; the
gentle spirit of Dr. Henry More, girding on the
armour of persecution, and rousing itself from a
Platonic reverie of the Divine Life to assume
the hood and cloak of a familiar of the Inquisition;
and the patient and inquiring Boyle,
putting aside for a while his searches for the
grand Magisterium, and listening, as if
spellbound, with gratified attention to stories of
witches at Oxford and devils at Mascon."

We have all heard of the wonderful discovery
of witches in the county of Lancashire. The first
of the "coven" tried was Mother Demdike:
an old woman of eighty, living in Pendle Forest, a
wild tract of land on the borders of Yorkshire,
who had been a witch for fifty years, and had
brought up children and grandchildren to the
business, being "a generall agent for the deuill
in all those partes." Twenty Pendle witches
were accused, and twelve were hanged: the
rest escaped, but most of them for a few years
only. Twenty-one years later, in sixteen 'thirty-
three, there was a second curse of Pendle
proclaimed by the deposition of a boy of eleven
years old. Painfully frequent in these histories
is the judicial murder of poor women for witchcraft,
on the faith of the wild inventions of
young children. But in this case, the wise
King James being no longer leader of the hunt,
the accusations were narrowly sifted, and the
boy at last confessed that his first batch of lies
was invented, at his father's suggestion, to
screen himself when he had been robbing an
orchard of plums. As the first witch-stories
had been so profitable as to bring his father
two cows, he gave reins to his fancy, and went
on to attack anybody within reach. Indeed, it
was not only to Matthew Hopkins that
witchfinding and inventing was a source of profit,
though he, of all men, who in the course of
business sent hundreds to the gallows, made a
handsome living out of it. Hopkins's great
business year was sixteen 'forty-five. In that
year thirty-six were arraigned at one time,
before one judge, and fourteen of them hanged.
Even Hopkins, living among his crude stories
of imps, like mice and moles, that brought
fortune to the women who cherished and obeyed
them, set a limit to the very mean wages given
by the devil to his servants. "Six shillings,"
he said, in the examination of Joan Ruccalver,
of Powstead, Suffolk, "six shillings was the
largest amount he had ever known given by an
imp to his dame."

The last witch-fire kindled in Scotland was in
seventeen 'twenty-seven, when a poor old woman
accused of transforming her daughter into a horse
to carry her to witches' meetings, and causing her
to be shod by the devil, so that she was lamed in
hands and feet, being found guilty, "was put into
a tar-barrel and burned at Dornoch in the bright
month of June. 'And it is said that after being
brought out to execution, the weather proving
very severe, she sat composedly warming herself
by the fire prepared to consume her, while the
other instruments of death were getting ready.'
The daughter escaped: afterwards she married
and had a son who was as lame as herself; and
lame in the same manner too; though it does
not appear that he was ever shod by the devil
and witch-ridden. 'And this son,' says Sir Walter
Scott, in 1830, 'was living so lately as to receive
the charity of the present Marchioness of Stafford,
Countess of Sutherland in her own right.'
This is the last execution for witchcraft in
Scotland; and in June, 1736, the Acts Anentis
Witchcraft were formally repealed."

The date of the last judicial execution for
witchcraft in England, is seventeen 'twelve.
Though, adds Mrs. Linton, to whose very
curious and interesting volume we refer the
reader for further information, "there is a report
current in most witch books of a case at a later
period—but I can find no authentic account of
it—that, in 1716, of a Mrs. Hicks and her little
daughter of nine, hanged at Huntingdon for
selling their souls to the devil, bewitching their
neighbours to death and their crops to ruin, and
as a climax to all, taking off their stockings to
raise a storm."

No one who is interested in this curious
subject, should be without Mrs. Linton's admirable
book.

RUSSIAN TRAVEL.

THE YEAMSCHEEK: ACROSS COUNTRY.

THE yeamscheek is a great Russian institution.
He is not to be confounded, as is
sometimes done by strangers, with the extortionate
ruffian drosky, lanska, and britska drivers, in
the streets of towns and cities, nor with the
coachmen of the gentry and aristocracy. He is
a distinct animal; the interior swarms with
him; he "works" every macadamised and
unmacadamised road in Russia, from the shores of
the White to the shores of the Black Sea; and
all roads are alike to him. Whether I make a
bargain with one to take me to Siberia, or to
the next town, it is all the same to him. He
goes off to his gang, puts me into a hat, and I am
drawn for. The fortunate drawer gets me for
his job, and is responsible to the rest for his
performance of the duty. I am quite safe with
him; he will carry out his part of the bargain,
if he can. The traveller, entirely at his mercy,
over endless tracks and plains, through dismal
forests, frost and snow, among wolves and
bears, never distrusts the poor yeamscheek.
He is neither a ruffian nor a robber, but simply
a peasant, who commenced driving troikas at
six years of age, and who will drive them till
he dies. He has one failing, the need of vodki:
give it him the traveller must, but let the
traveller give it sparingly; and if you hit the right
mean between parsimony and indiscretion as to
this point, he will do anything for his charge