All these regulations, moreover, did not apply exclusively to Sunday; for although the Kirk forbade the observance of old Church festivals, it rigidly enforced its own fasts and days of thanksgiving. There was public service in the towns usually every Wednesday and Friday, and work was as absolutely forbidden during service time on those days, and attendance at kirk as strictly enjoined, as on Sundays. Moreover, the non-observance of an appointed fast was visited with a heavy fine. For the further protection of the people from any teaching contrary to the received standard, the Press was carefully guarded, and the publication of any work bearing on religion forbidden, unless it had first received the _imprimatur_ of the Kirk's official "superintendent"; and publishers who issued books which proved to be obnoxious to the ecclesiastical authorities were compelled to withdraw them. The purchase of Bibles, moreover, was not left to the zeal or discretion of the people; but by an act of 1576, every householder worth 300 marks annual rent, and every yeoman or burgess having stock valued at L500, was compelled to procure a Bible and a Psalm-book, under a penalty of L10 (Scots). Next to importance in the guidance of religious teaching and worship, and indeed closely connected with it, in the estimation of the Scottish ecclesiastical courts, came the question of witchcraft and sorcery. The annals of the country throughout the seventeenth century, together with the closing years of the preceding one, are full of stories of the trial, torture, and punishment of alleged witches; and even in the early years of the eighteenth century there are occasional instances of persons proceeded against in the Kirk Sessions for using charms, and similar superstitious practices. The unfortunate women charged with selling their souls to Satan in exchange for occult powers seldom succeeded in establishing their innocence, and juries which ventured to acquit them were themselves occasionally charged with "wilful error" for so doing. Under these circumstances it would seem that the accused, abandoning all hope of escape, frequently took pleasure in exciting the wonder and the horror of the court by the weird and marvellous tales which they invented of their evil deeds; and no tale could be too marvellous for belief. It made no difference in the enormity of the crime whether the supernatural powers ascribed to the prisoner were used for good objects or for evil; Isabel Haldane, who "cured Andrew Duncan's bairn, by bringing water from the burn at Turret Port," Margaret Hornscleugh, who restored Alexander Mason's wife to health and renewed the milking powers of Robert Christie's cow, were burnt equally with Agnes Simpson, who had raised a storm to drown King James, and Catherine Campbell, who had struck her young mistress with convulsions. Foremost in hunting down these poor deluded, or maligned creatures, were the ministers of the Kirk; and practically the