ned as witches, had drawn several hundred children of all classes
under the devil's authority. They demanded, therefore, the punishment of
these agents of hell, reminding the judges that the province had been
clear of witches since the burning of some on a former occasion. The
accused were numerous, so many as threescore and ten witches and
sorcerers being seized in the village of Mohra; three-and-twenty
confessed their crimes, and were sent to Faluna, where most of them were
executed. Fifteen of the children were also led to death. Six-and-thirty
of those who were young were forced to run the gauntlet, as it is
called, and were, besides, lashed weekly at the church doors for a whole
year. Twenty of the youngest were condemned to the same discipline for
three days only.

The process seems to have consisted in confronting the children with the
witches, and hearing the extraordinary story which the former insisted
upon maintaining. The children, to the number of three hundred, were
found more or less perfect in a tale as full of impossible absurdities
as ever was told around a nursery fire. Their confession ran thus:--

They were taught by the witches to go to a cross way, and with certain
ceremonies to invoke the devil by the name of Antecessor, begging him to
carry them off to Blockula, meaning, perhaps, the Brockenberg, in the
Hartz forest, a mountain infamous for being the common scene of witches'
meetings, and to which Goethe represents the spirit Mephistopheles as
conducting his pupil Faustus. The devil courteously appeared at the call
of the children in various forms, but chiefly as a mad Merry-Andrew,
with a grey coat, red and blue stockings, a red beard, a high-crowned
hat, with linen of various colours wrapt round it, and garters of
peculiar length. He set each child on some beast of his providing, and
anointed them with a certain unguent composed of the scrapings of altars
and the filings of church clocks. There is here a discrepancy of
evidence which in another court would have cast the whole. Most of the
children considered their journey to be corporeal and actual. Some
supposed, however, that their strength or spirit only travelled with the
fiend, and that their body remained behind. Very few adopted this last
hypothesis, though the parents unanimously bore witness that the bodies
of the children remained in bed, and could not be awakened out of a deep
sleep, though they shook them for the purpose of awakeni