, to their souls' eternal perdition if they yielded to the
desires of their bodies,--like the fatal Banshie, harbinger of death and
ruin,--were the popular forms of the Scottish spirit-world; and in none of
them do we find either love or gentleness, but only fierceness and crime,
enmity to man and rebellion to God. But saddest and darkest and unholiest
of all was the belief in witchcraft, which infested society for centuries
like a sore eating through to the very heart of humanity, and which was
nowhere more bitter and destructive than among the godly children of our
Northern sister. Strange that the land of the Lord should have been the
favourite camping-ground of Satan, that the hill of Zion should have had
its roots in the depths of Tophet!

The formulas of the faith were as gloomy as the persons. The power of the
evil eye; the faculty of second sight, which always saw the hearse plumes,
and never the bridal roses; the supremacy of the devil in this
God-governed world of ours, and the actual and practical covenant into
which men and women daily entered with him; the unlimited influence of the
curse, and the sin and mischief to be wrought by charm and spell; the
power of casting sickness on whomsoever one would, and the ease with which
a blight could be sent on the corn, and a murrain to the beasts, by those
who had not wherewithal to stay their hunger for a day, these were the
chief signs of that fatal power with which Satan endowed his chosen
ones--those silly, luckless chapmen who bartered away their immortal souls
for no mess of pottage even, and no earthly good to breath or body, but
only that they might harm their neighbours and revenge themselves on those
who crossed them. Sometimes, indeed, they had no need to chaffer with the
devil for such faculties: as in the matter of the evil eye; for Kirk, of
Aberfoyle, tells us that "some are of so venomous a Constitution, by being
radiated in Envy and Malice, that they pierce and kill (like a Cockatrice)
whatever Creature they first set their Eyes on in the Morning: so was it
with Walter Grahame, some Time living in the Parock wherein now I am, who
killed his own Cow after commending its Fatness, and shot a Hair with his
Eyes, having praised its Swiftness (such was the Infection of ane Evill
Eye); albeit this was unusual, yet he saw no Object but what was obvious
to other Men as well as to himselfe." And a certain woman looking over the
door of a byre or cowhouse, where