a joke does not appear, but she was looked upon as a criminal
more than usually atrocious. Seventy persons were condemned to death on
these so awful yet so ridiculous confessions. Twenty-three of them were
burned together, in one fire, in the village of Mohra, in the presence
of thousands of delighted spectators. On the following day fifteen
children were murdered in the same manner; offered up in sacrifice to
the bloody Moloch of superstition. The remaining thirty-two were
executed at the neighbouring town of Fahluna. Besides these, fifty-six
children were found guilty of witchcraft in a minor degree, and
sentenced to various punishments, such as running the gauntlet,
imprisonment, and public whipping once a week for a twelvemonth.

Long after the occurrence of this case, it was cited as one of the most
convincing proofs upon record of the prevalence of witchcraft. When
men wish to construct or support a theory, how they torture facts into
their service! The lying whimsies of a few sick children, encouraged by
foolish parents, and drawn out by superstitious neighbours, were
sufficient to set a country in a flame. If, instead of commissioners as
deeply sunk in the slough of ignorance as the people they were sent
amongst, there had been deputed a few men firm in courage and clear in
understanding, how different would have been the result! Some of the
poor children who were burned would have been sent to an infirmary;
others would have been well flogged; the credulity of the parents would
have been laughed at, and the lives of seventy persons spared. The
belief in witchcraft remains in Sweden to this day; but, happily, the
annals of that country present no more such instances of lamentable
aberration of intellect as the one just cited.

In New England, about the same time, the colonists were scared by
similar stories of the antics of the devil. All at once a fear seized
upon the multitude, and supposed criminals were arrested day after day
in such numbers, that the prisons were found too small to contain them.
A girl, named Goodwin, the daughter of a mason, who was hypochondriac
and subject to fits, imagined that an old Irishwoman, named Glover, had
bewitched her. Her two brothers, in whose constitutions there was
apparently a predisposition to similar fits, went off in the same way,
crying out that the devil and Dame Glover were tormenting them. At
times their joints were so stiff that they could not be moved, while at