Witch Stories (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: with victims, wanted to save her; but she would accept no chance offered to her. 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, even if 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." How many poor wretches had been like this unhappy creature?"disowned by husband and friends," " seeing no ground of hope of ever coming in credit again," and therefore in despair "choosing rather to die than to live!" In this special case even the magistrates, usually so passionately determined that all accused should be found guilty and suffer death, even they seem to have sought her release, and to have refused the evidence of her confession as long as they could. But the times were not sufficiently enlightened for them to refuse it altogether; and she gained the fiery goal whither her anguish and despair impelled he...