nst him. He was put to the torture. First, his head was
"thrawed with a rope" for about an hour, but still he would not confess;
then they tried fair words and coaxed him, but with no better success; and
then they put him to the "most severe and cruell pains in the worlde,"
namely, the boots, till his legs were completely crushed, and the blood
and marrow spouted out. After the third stroke he became speechless; and
they, supposing it to be the devil's mark which kept him silent, searched
for that mark, that by its discovery the spell might be broken. So they
found it, as stated before, under his tongue, with two charmed pins stuck
up to their heads therein. When they were drawn out--that is, after some
further torture--he confessed anything which it pleased his tormentors to
demand of him, saying how, just now, the devil had been to him all in
black, but with a white wand in his hand; and how, on his, Fian's,
renouncing him, he had brake his wand, and disappeared. The next day he
recanted this confession. He was then somewhat restored to himself, and
had mastered the weakness of his agony. Whereupon it was assumed that the
devil had visited him through the night, and had marked him afresh. They
searched him--pulling off every nail with a turkas, or smith's pincers,
and then thrusting in needles up to their heads; but finding nothing more
satanic than blood and nerves, they put him to worse tortures, as a
revenge. He made no other relapse, but remained constant now to the end;
bearing his grievous pains with patience and fortitude, and dying as a
brave man always knows how to die, whatever the occasion. Finding that
nothing more could be made of him, they mercifully came to an end. He was
strangled and burnt "in the Castle Hill of Edinbrough, on a Saterdaie, in
the ende of Januarie last past 1591;" ending a may be loose and not
over-heroic life in a manner worthy of the most glorious martyr of
history. John Fian, schoolmaster of Saltpans, with no great idea to
support him, and no admiring friends to cheer him on, bore himself as
nobly as any hero of them all, and vindicated the honour of manhood and
natural strength in a way that exalts our common human nature into
something godlike and divine.

THE GRACE WIFE OF KEITH AND HER CUMMERS.[6]

Fian was the first victim in the grand battue offered now to the royal
witchfinder; others were to follow, the manner of whose discovery was
singular enough. Deputy Bailie David Sea