The atrocious cruelties habitually exercised almost exceed credibility. A Masalki caused his hounds to devour a peasant who chanced to fright his horse; a Radzivil had the belly of one of his serfs ripped open, that he might thrust his feet into it, in the hope of being cured of a malady with which he was afflicted. Still there were laws in Poland, but how were they executed? A peasant, going to the market at Warsaw, met a man who had just assassinated another: he seized the murderer, bound him, and having placed him in his wagon together with the body of his victim, he went to deliver him up to the nearest Starost. On his arrival, he was asked if he had ten ducats to pay for his interference, and on his answering in the negative, he was sent back with his dead and living lumber. After this fact, the reader will not be surprised to learn, that it cost a merchant of Warsaw fourteen hundred dollars to prosecute to conviction and execution two robbers who had plundered him. To this injustice were joined the most barbarous ignorance and superstition. In 1781, the Starost Potocki, in passing through a village, learned that on the following day, a person accused of sorcery was to be burned alive. He examined the accused, inquired the hour at which the execution was to take place, and returned home to make preparation for preventing this legal murder, by carrying off the prisoner when on his way to the stake. The magistrates of the village received intimation of his design, and hastened the execution, so that when Potocki arrived, he had the mortification to find that the man had already been sacrificed. Nor were this ignorance and this superstition confined to any particular class or order: in these respects people of the highest rank were perfectly on a level with the meanest serfs. A Polish baroness who had gained notoriety both at home and in France by her spirit of intrigue and the wit of her correspondence, was in the habit of burning frankincense and sprinkling her apartments with holy water whenever a thunder storm approached her castle.--One day, when in spite of these pious precautions the lightning struck and threw down her chimneys, she had recourse to an expedient which she regarded as infallible, namely, the burying round her house thirty copies of the Gospel of St. John; a custom still piously practised on Christmas-day in all the churches in Poland.