ove her
head backwards and forwards, to sigh, and to pass her fingers across her
eye-brows. This lasted a minute, then she raised her eyes, looked once
or twice around with timidity and embarrassment, then began to talk in
French; when she would describe all the particulars of her escape from
France, and, assuming the manner of a French woman, talk purer and
better accented French than she had been known to be capable of talking
before, correct her friends when they spoke incorrectly, but delicately
and with a comment on the German rudeness of laughing at the bad
pronunciation of strangers; and if led herself to speak or read German,
she used a French accent, and spoke it ill; and the like.

Now, suppose this lady, instead of thus acting, when the paroxysms
supervened, had cast herself on the ground, had uttered bad language and
blasphemy, and had worn a sarcastic and malignant expression of
countenance,--in striking contrast with her ordinary character and
behaviour, and _alternating with it_,--and you have the picture and the
reality of a person "possessed."

A person, "possessed," is one affected with the form of trance-waking
called double consciousness, with the addition of being deranged when in
the paroxysm, and then, out of the suggestions of her own fancy, or
catching at the interpretation put on her conduct by others, believing
herself tenanted by the fiend.

We may quite allowably heighten the above picture by supposing that the
person in her trance, in addition to being mad, might have displayed
some of the perceptive powers occasionally developed in trance; and so
have evinced, in addition to her demoniacal ferocity, an "uncanny"
knowledge of things and persons. To be candid, Archy, time was, when I
should myself have had my doubts in such a case.

We have by this time had intercourse enough with spirits and demons to
prepare us for the final subject of witchcraft.

The superstition of witchcraft stretches back into remote antiquity, and
has many roots. In Europe it is partly of Druidical origin. The
Druidesses were part priestesses, part shrewd old ladies, who dealt in
magic and medicine. They were called _all-rune_, all-knowing. There was
some touch of classical superstition mingled in the stream which was
flowing down to us;--so an edict of a council of Treves, in the year
1310, has this injunction: "Nulla mulierum se nocturnis horis equitare
cum Diana propitiatur; haec enim doemoniaca est illusio."