* * * * * The anxiety about witchcraft manifested by the General Assembly and parliament this year, was not allowed to expend itself in empty words. ‘This summer,’ says Lamont in his _Diary_, ‘there was very many witches taken and brunt in several parts of this kingdom, as in Lothian and Fife.’ The register of the Committee of Estates shews no fewer than five several commissions issued on the 4th, and two on the 6th of December, for the trial of witches in various parts of the country. The procedure, as far as revealed to us, seems to have been this: The suspected were first taken in hand by the minister and his session or consistory, with a view to obtain proof or extort confession. Generally, the poor wretches--moved partly by their own religious feelings--confessed; then a commission was sought for and granted to certain gentlemen of the district, for the trial of the accused. The trial seems to have been little more than a form, for condemnation and execution almost invariably followed. Margaret Henderson, ‘Lady Pittathrow,’ described as sister to the Laird of Fordel, and residing in Inverkeithing, was delated by sundry persons who had lately suffered for witchcraft, ‘to be ane witch, and that she has keepit several meetings and abominable society with the devil.’ So says a grave petition of the General Assembly to parliament (July 19). Fearing punishment, she withdrew to the city of Edinburgh, and there lurked ‘till it pleasit the Almighty God to dispose in His providence that she is now apprehendit and put in firmance in the Tolbooth.’ The Assembly now craving her trial, so that ‘this land and city may be free of her, and justice done upon her,’ the Estates were pleased to issue a command to Mr Thomas Nicholson, his majesty’s advocate, to proceed with her arraignment before the justice-general; and if she be guilty of the said crime, ‘to convict and condemn her, pronounce sentence of death against, cause strangle her, and burn her body, and do every requisite in sic cases.’ The diarist Lamont gives us the conclusion of the case. ‘After remaining in prison for a time, [she] being in health at night, was upon the morning found dead. It was thought and spoken by many that she wronged herself, either by strangling or poison; but we leave that to the judgment of the great day.’ [Sidenote: 1649.]