y an inch of candle in the hand of an
old woman!

When Strahan left me, I went out, but not yet to visit patients. I stole
through by-paths into the fields; I needed solitude to bring my thoughts
into shape and order. What was delusion, and what not? Was I right or
the Public? Was Margrave really the most innocent and serviceable of
human beings, kindly affectionate, employing a wonderful acuteness for
benignant ends? Was I, in truth, indebted to him for the greatest
boon one man can bestow on another,--for life rescued, for fair name
justified? Or had he, by some demoniac sorcery, guided the hand of the
murderer against the life of the person who alone could imperil his own?
Had he, by the same dark spells, urged the woman to the act that had
destroyed the only record of his monstrous being,--the only evidence
that I was not the sport of an illusion in the horror with which he
inspired me?

But if the latter supposition could be admissible, did he use his
agents only to betray them afterwards to exposure, and that, without any
possible clew to his own detection as the instigator? Then, there came
over me confused recollections of tales of mediaeval witchcraft, which
I had read in boyhood. Were there not on judicial record attestation and
evidence, solemn and circumstantial, of powers analogous to those
now exercised by Margrave,--of sorcerers instigating to sin through
influences ascribed to Demons; making their apparitions glide through
guarded walls, their voices heard from afar in the solitude of dungeons
or monastic cells; subjugating victims to their will, by means which
no vigilance could have detected, if the victims themselves had not
confessed the witchcraft that had ensnared, courting a sure and infamous
death in that confession, preferring such death to a life so haunted?
Were stories so gravely set forth in the pomp of judicial evidence,
and in the history of times comparatively recent, indeed to be massed,
pell-mell together, as a moles indigesta of senseless superstition,--all
the witnesses to be deemed liars; all the victims and tools of the
sorcerers, lunatics; all the examiners or judges, with their solemn
gradations--lay and clerical--from Commissions of Inquiry to Courts of
Appeal,--to be despised for credulity, loathed for cruelty; or, amidst
records so numerous, so imposingly attested, were there the fragments of
a terrible truth? And had our ancestors been so unwise in those laws we
now deem so