, and the Gentile witch was
a poisoner, a maker of philtres or love potions, and a vulgar sort of
magician. The devil part of the business did not begin until a good
while after Christ. During the last century or so, again, while
witchcraft has been extensively believed in, the witch has degenerated
into a very vulgar and poverty stricken sort of conjuring woman. Take
our New York city witches, for instance. They live in cheap and dirty
streets that smell bad; their houses are in the same style, infected
with a strong odor of cabbage, onions, washing-day, old dinners, and
other merely sublunary smells. Their rooms are very ill furnished, and
often beset with wash-tubs, swill-pails, mops and soiled clothes; their
personal appearance is commonly unclean, homely, vulgar, coarse, and
ignorant, and often rummy. Their fee is a quarter or half of a dollar.
Sometimes a dollar. Their divination is worked by cutting and dealing
cards or studying the palm of your hand. And the things which they tell
you are the most silly and shallow babble in the world; a mess of
phrases worn out over and over again. Here is a specimen, as gabbled to
the customer over a pack of cards laid out on the table; anybody can do
the like: "You face a misfortune. I think it will come upon you within
three weeks, but it may not. A dark complexioned man faces your
life-card. He is plotting against you, and you must beware of him. Your
marriage-card faces two young women, one fair and the other dark. One
you will have, and the other you will not. I think you will have the
fair one. She favors the dark complexioned man, which means trouble. You
face money, but you must earn it. There is a good deal, but you may not
get much of it" etc., etc. These words are exactly the sort of stuff
that is sold by the witches of to-day. But the greatest witch humbug of
all the witchcraft of history, is that of Christendom for about three
hundred years, beginning about the time of the discovery of America. To
that period belonged the Salem witchcraft of New England, the
witch-finding of Matthew Hopkins in Old England, the Scotch witch
trials, and the Swedish and German and French witch mania.

The peculiar traits of the witchcraft of this period are among the most
mysterious of all humbugs. The most usual points in a case of witchcraft
were, that the witch had sold herself to the devil for all eternity, in
order to get the power during a few years of earthly life, to inflict a