d times of the seventeenth
century. Even as late as 1722, in Sutherlandshire, a woman was burned
for witchcraft. Her crime was that she had transformed her own daughter
into a pony, and had ridden her throughout an entire night. Conclusive
proof of the charge was found in the fact that the poor woman's daughter
was lame afterwards both in hands and feet.

Nothing was too absurd, no charge too wicked or too childish, to obtain
universal belief in those times.]

Meantime, bound to the saddle in front of his captor, by little-known
hill paths the judge had been borne swiftly through the night. The long,
melancholy wail of a whaup, the eerie hoot of an owl, at times smote
dully on his ear; but to all his entreaties and his questions no human
voice made answer; in stony silence his abductor rode steadily on. Over
hill and dale, over rough ground and smooth, splashing through marshy
soil where the hoofs of the heavily laden horse sucked juicily, through
burns, and across sodden peaty moor where the smell of swamp rose rank
on the night air, they floundered; and once the homely smell of peat
reek told the unhappy judge that they passed within hail of some human
dwelling. But throughout the night he saw nothing, and gradually the
long strain, the discomfort of being pitched forward or back as the
horse scrambled up or down where the ground was extra rough and broken,
the pain of sitting half in, half out, of a saddle, told upon a frame
unaccustomed to much exercise, and at intervals he wholly or partially
lost consciousness. Thus unutterably distressed in body and broken in
spirit, in one of these partial lapses it seemed to the judge--as it
might be in some disordered nightmare--that there came a respite from
the torment of ceaseless motion, and that by means of some unknown
agency he lay in heavenly peace, stretched full length on a couch or
bed. He thought--or did he dream?--that he had heard, as it were far
off, the muffled trairip of feet and the murmur of low voices; and it
seemed almost as if his body, after falling from some vast height, had
been lifted and gently swung in the air. But exhaustion of mind and body
was so great that the problem of what might be happening was quite
beyond solution; let him only rest and sleep.

Then, later, it seemed to him that he woke from broken, tossing
slumber. But it was dark, and he fell again into an uneasy doze, in
which every muscle and bone in his harassed old body ached pitif