Page:Faithhealingchri00buckiala.djvu/219

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WITCHCRAFT
205
in concluding his story: "The white witch told me to always wear this over my breast, and that inside of three days I shall have one fit more, but after that I will never have another symptom of the kind." The following evening when at supper he had another severe attack of his old trouble, but sure enough it was the last. He lived more than twenty years after that, but never had another symptom of fits, or nervous difficulty of any kind. He was absolutely cured, as I know.

In March, 1831, the case of an old woman in Edinburgh came before the court on account of her being attacked.

In 1827 a man was burned as a wizard in south-western Russia; and in 1815 a person in northern Russia was sentenced by a legal tribunal to undergo thirty-five blows of the knout, as well as a public church penance, for witchcraft.

In 1815 Captain Samuel Ward well of Maine, captain of the schooner Polly, desiring to excel all his competitors in the number of trips made between Boston and Penobscot in one season, hired Mrs. Leach, a reputed witch, for a bushel of meal a trip, to guarantee him fair winds.

"Moll Pitcher," so famous that for more than fifty years "to her came the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant, the accomplished and the vulgar, the brave and the timid," died April 9, 1813, in Lynn, Massachusetts, aged seventy-five years.

Contemporary with her was a woman in Newburyport, who came from Scotland in 1759 or 1760. Her career for many years was such as to command the respect and fear of the people. Mr. Samuel L. Knapp, who wrote in 1825, speaks of another supposed witch in Massachusetts named Danforth, who lived in a gloomy, hollow glen. On this Mr. Samuel G. Drake, writing in 1869, says:

The writer is not as old as he from whom the above extracts are made; but it was his fortune in youth to be acquainted in many towns, in nearly all of which there was a reputed witch.