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said with faith and unction, she was sure to have at once a lucky churn-full.

These queer bits of half-papistical, half-nonsensical doggerel were considered tremendous sins in those days, and the use of them was quite sufficient to bring any one to the scaffold; as their application would, for a certainty, destroy health, and gear, and life, if it were so willed. And for all these crimes—storm-raising, cat-baptizing, and the rest—Agnes Sampson, the grave, matronlike, well-educated grace wife of Keith, was bound to a stake, strangled, and burnt on the Castle Hill, with no one to seek to save her, and no one to bid her weary soul God-speed!

Barbara Napier, wife to a burgess of Edinburgh, and sister-in-law to the Laird of Carschoggill, was then seized—accused of consorting with Agnes Simpson, and consulting with Richard Grahame, a notorious necromancer, to whom she gave “3 ells of bombezie for his paynes,” all that she might gain the love and gifts of Dame Jeane Lyon, Lady Angus; also of having procured the witch’s help to keep the said Dame Jeane “fra wometing quhen she was in bredin of barne.” She was accused of other and more malicious things; but acquitted of these: indeed the “assisa” which tried her was contumacious and humane, and pronounced no doom; whereon King James wrote a letter demanding that she be strangled, then burnt at the stake, and all her goods escheated to himself. But Barbara pleaded that she was with child; so her execution was delayed until she was delivered, when “nobody insisting in the