redients, too, from which the times are not yet
purged. A century ago people did not know--do they now?--that vindictive
punishment is a crime; that the only allowable purpose of punishment is
to prevent the recurrence of the offence; and that restraint, isolation,
employment, instruction, are the extreme and only means towards that end
which reason and humanity justify. Alas, for human nature! Some
centuries hence, the first half of the nineteenth century will be
charged with having manifested no admission of principle in advance of a
period, the judicial crimes of which make the heart shudder. The old
lady witches had, of course, much livelier ideas than the innocent
children, on the subject of their intercourse with the devils.

At Mora, in Sweden, in 1669, of many who were put to the torture and
executed, seventy-two women agreed in the following avowal, that they
were in the habit of meeting at a place called Blocula. That on their
calling out "Come forth!" the Devil used to appear to them in a gray
coat, red breeches, gray stockings, with a red beard, and a peaked hat
with party-coloured feathers on his head. He then enforced upon them,
not without blows, that they must bring him, at nights, their own and
other peoples' children, stolen for the purpose. They travel through the
air to Blocula either on beasts or on spits, or broomsticks. When they
have many children with them, they rig on an additional spar to lengthen
the back of the goat or their broom-stick that the children may have
room to sit. At Blocula they sign their name in blood and are baptized.
The Devil is a humorous, pleasant gentleman; but his table is coarse
enough, which makes the children often sick on their way home, the
product being the so-called witch-butter found in the fields. When the
Devil is larky, he solicits the witches to dance round him on their
brooms, which he suddenly pulls from under them, and uses to beat them
with till they are black and blue. He laughs at this joke till his sides
shake again. Sometimes he is in a more gracious mood, and plays to them
lovely airs upon the harp; and occasionally sons and daughters are born
to the Devil, which take up their residence at Blocula.

I will add an outline of the history, furnished or corroborated by her
voluntary confession, of a lady witch, nearly the last executed for this
crime. She was, at the time of her death, seventy years of age, and had
been many years sub-prioress of the co