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THE WITCHES OF SCOTLAND.

Maclean—the fine, brave, handsome Euphemia—writhed in agony at the stake to which she was boudn when burned alive in the flames: “brunt in assis quick to the deid,” says the Record—the severest sentence ever passed on a witch. The murder was done on the 25th July, 1591.

“The last of Februarie, 1592, Richard Grahame wes brant at ye Cross of Edinburghe for vitchcrafte and sorcery,” says succinctly Robert Birrel, “burges of Edinburghe,” in his “Diarey containing divers Passages of Staite and uthers memorable Accidents, from ye 1532 zeir of our Redemption, till ye beginning of the zeir 1605.” “And in 1593, Katherine Muirhead was brunt for vitchcrafte, quha confest sundrie poynts yrof.” Richard Graham was the “Rychie Graham, and necromancer,” consulted by Barbara Napier; the same who gave the Earl of Bothwell some drug to make the king’s majesty “lyke weill of him,” if he could but touch king’s majesty on the face therewith; it was he also who raised the devil for Sir Lewis Ballantyne, in his own yard in the Canongate, whereby Sir Lewis was so terrified that he took sickness and died. Even in the presence of the king himself, Rychie boasted that “he had a familiar spirit which showed him many things;” but which somehow forgot to show him the stake and the rope and the faggot, which yet were the bold necromancer’s end, little as the poor cozening wretch merited such an awful doom.


THE TWO ALISONS.

June, 1596, had nearly seen a nobler victim than those usually accorded. John Stuart, Master of Orkney, and brother of the Earl, “was dilatit of consulting with