been cut out of his cheek more cleanly than any ordinary
razor could have cut either flesh or cheese. Christian bore herself
strangely. She expressed no sorrow, perhaps because she felt none, and
absolutely refused to see or touch the corpse according to the fashion of
the honest and the orthodox of the time. This refusal did her much harm in
men's minds, for was it not very evident that she was afraid of the
bier-law, or bahr-recht, which, in 1661, when all this took place, was
such a useful agent of the police, and helped so powerfully to the
discovery of murder? The bailies and ministers heard the rumours affecting
her, and commanded her to be brought into the house to touch the corpse,
as the rest had done. "She came trembling all the way to the house, but
she refused to come nigh the corpse, or to touch it, saying that 'she
never touched a dead corpse in her life.'" The neighbours did not allow of
her plea, and dragged her to the murdered man, that she might touch it
softly. She went forward to do so. "But before shoe did it, the Sone being
shyning in at the howse, shoe exprest herselfe thus, humbly desyring that,
'as the Lord made the Sone to shine and give light into that howse, that
also he would give light to discovering of that murder!' And with these
words shoe tuitching the wound of the dead man verie softlie, it being
whyte and cleane, without any spot of blood or the lyke, yet immediately,
while her fingers was upon it, the blood rushed owt of it, to the greate
admiratioune of all the behoulders, who tooke it for discoverie of the
murder according to her own prayers." Another charge, no less grave than
that of murder, was, that William Richardson, having felled one of her
hens with a stone, she frowned on him threateningly, and said he should
never throw another stone. And he never did; for immediately he fell into
ane "franicie" and madness, took to his bed, and died in a few days, all
the time of his sickness crying out against Cristiane Wilson, who, he
said, was tormenting him in the likeness of a grey cat. After his death
his nephew teased the witch by calling her "The Lanthorne," which every
one knew to be her devil-name; but Cristiane threatened him, and said that
"if he did not hold his peace she would make him die by the same death as
his uncle," which was proof sufficient of the truth of the grey cat and
her guilty sorcery. This was the same Cristiane Wilson who, when she was
being carried off to Nid