Spina
has a list still more fearful. He informs us that, in the year 1524, no
less than a thousand persons suffered death for witchcraft in the
district of Como, and that for several years afterwards the average
number of victims exceeded a hundred annually. One inquisitor,
Remigius, took great credit to himself for having, during fifteen
years, convicted and burned nine hundred.

In France, about the year 1520, fires for the execution of witches
blazed in almost every town. Danaeus, in his "Dialogues of Witches,"
says they were so numerous that it would be next to impossible to tell
the number of them. So deep was the thraldom of the human mind, that
the friends and relatives of the accused parties looked on and
approved. The wife or sister of a murderer might sympathise in his
fate, but the wives and husbands of sorcerers and witches had no pity.
The truth is that pity was dangerous, for it was thought no one could
have compassion on the sufferings of a witch who was not a dabbler in
the art: to have wept for a witch would have insured the stake. In some
districts, however, the exasperation of the people broke out, in spite
of superstition. The inquisitor of a rural township in Piedmont burned
the victims so plentifully, and so fast, that there was not a family in
the place which did not lose a member. The people at last arose, and
the inquisitor was but too happy to escape from the country with whole
limbs. The Archbishop of the diocese proceeded afterwards to the trial
of such as the inquisitor had left in prison.

Some of the charges were so utterly preposterous that the poor wretches
were at once liberated; others met a harder, but the usual fate. Some
of them were accused of having joined the witches' dance at midnight
under a blasted oak, where they had been seen by creditable people. The
husbands of several of these women (two of whom were young and
beautiful) swore positively that at the time stated their wives were
comfortably asleep in their arms; but it was all in vain. Their word
was taken, but the Archbishop told them they had been deceived by the
devil and their own senses. It was true they might have had the
semblance of their wives in their beds, but the originals were far
away, at the devil's dance under the oak. The honest fellows were
confounded, and their wives burned forthwith.

In the year 1561, five poor women of Verneuil were accused of
transforming themselves into cats, and in that shape at