paid a hundred merks, that they were allowed to proceed with the beeves to the starving burgh of Dumfries. This pitiable affair, which reads so strangely of Dumfries, now the scene of magnificent markets for the transfer of cattle, came under the notice of the Privy Council, and was remitted to the ordinary judges to be settled by them as they might think best.--_P. C. R._ * * * * * [Sidenote: 1598-9. JAN. 19.] Thomas Lorn, residing at Overton of Dyce, was brought before the provost of Aberdeen, accused of ‘hearing of spreits, and wavering ofttimes frae his wife, bairns, and family, by the space of seven weeks,’ they not knowing ‘where he has been during the said space.’ He agreed that, if he should ever be found absenting himself in that manner, without giving warning, he should suffer death ‘as ane guilty person, dealer with spreits.’--_Ab. C. R._ * * * * * [Sidenote: 1599. JULY 26.] Andrew Melville, of whose courage and zeal for pure presbytery Scottish history is at this time full, presided at a disputation in the theological hall of St Mary’s College, St Andrews, where the question was, ‘Whether by divining or diabolical force of witches and hags, bodies may be transported or transformed, or souls released for a time from bodies, and whether this transportation or transformation of bodies, or resemblance of a projected corpse, without sense and motion, as if the soul were banished, be a simple lethargy, or a certain evidence of execrable demonomania?‘[240] [Sidenote: 1599.]