red that by means of a doll stuck over with needles
they could weave their spells around whomever they pleased, making him
waste away until he died. They averred that mandragora, torn from
beneath the gallows by the teeth of a dog, who invariably died
therefrom, enabled them to pervert the understanding; to turn men into
beasts, to give women over to idiotcy and madness. Still more dreadful
was the furious frenzy caused by the Thorn-apple, or Datura, which
made men dance themselves to death, and go through a thousand shameful
antics, without their own knowledge or remembrance.[68]

[68] Pouchet, on the _Solaneae and General Botany_. Nysten,
_Dictionary of Medicine_, article _Datura_. The robbers
employed these potions but too often. A butcher of Aix and
his wife, whom they wanted to rob of their money, were made
to drink of some such, and became so maddened thereby, that
they danced all one night naked in a cemetery.

* * * * *

Hence there grew up against them a feeling of boundless hatred,
mingled with as extreme a fear. Sprenger, who wrote the _Hammer for
Witches_, relates with horror how, in a season of snow, when all the
roads were broken up, he saw a wretched multitude, wild with terror,
and spell-bound by evils all too real, fill up all the approaches to a
little German town. "Never," says he, "did you behold so mighty a
pilgrimage to our Lady of Grace, or her of the wilderness. All these
people, who hobbled, crawled, and stumbled among the quagmires, were
on their way to the Witch, to beseech the grace of the Devil upon
themselves. How proud and excited must the old woman have felt at
seeing so large a concourse prostrate before her feet!"[69]

[69] The Witch delighted in causing the noble and the great
to undergo the most outrageous trials of their love. We know
that queens and ladies of rank (in Italy even to the last
century) held their court at times the most forbidding, and
exacted the most unpleasant services from their favourites.
There was nothing too mean, too repulsive, for the domestic
brute--the _cicisbeo_, the priest, the half-witted page--to
undergo, in the stupid belief that the power of a philtre
increased with its nastiness. This was sad enough when the
ladies were neither young, nor beautiful, nor witty. But what
of that other astounding fact, that a Witch, who was neither
a great lady, n