According to Barrington, thirty thousand witches were burned in England, five hundred perished in three months at Geneva, and a thousand at Como in one year. The number committed to the flames in Scotland is incalculable, but no less than six hundred witches were indicted during the sitting of one parliament at Edinburgh. Suspicion, abhorrence, accusation, trial, and death followed each other with appalling rapidity. Thus we find in history, that the savage spirit of ignorance and credulity which impelled the great Cardinal Beaton to burn six men at the stake, on the charge of heresy, was out-Heroded by the still greater ignorance and credulity of his successors, who, for each of these six, sacrificed more than thousands for the imaginary crime of witchcraft. CHAPTER XXXV. THE COLLEGE OF JUSTICE. "No! in an accursed spot--our magic tree, Where devils from of yore their sabbath keep-- Has all this been contrived; there did she sell Her soul to the eternal fiend, to be With brief vain-glory honoured in this world. Bid her stretch forth her arm, and ye will see The puncture, by which hell hath marked its own." SCHILLER'S _Maid of Orleans_ The summer solstice was passed. Heavily and louringly the 15th of July dawned over Edinburgh; and one hour after the portes were unclosed, the Right Honourable Knight, Sir Simon Preston of Craigmillar, the new Lord Provost of the city and Admiral of the Forth, entered by the Kirk-of-field Wynd, sheathed in full armour, with a party of horse; when, conformably to the orders of his eminence the cardinal, John Muckleheid, senior bailie, joined him with three hundred archers--the same burgher-archers who had lined the streets exactly two months before, on the entrance of Queen Magdalene. A tumult was expected; very few merchants or chapmen opened their booths on this morning; and those between the Bell-house and the Tron remained closed. Sir John Forrester's guards were doubled at the palace, the Mint, the castle-gate, and elsewhere; and after arming themselves with more than usual care, vast crowds of burghers poured towards the Exchequer Chambers, or _'Checquer Chalmers_, as they then named them. The stacks of heather, broom, whins, and of other fuel, which were then permitted to encumber the street, either as being the property of householders, or for sale, bore each on their summit a load of urchins, whose yells and outcries served to increase the general clamour. A flag was flying on the steeple of the Tolbooth, which had been built fifty years before, by John Mercer, master mason; and thirteen shops (formed at the same period), in the vaults below the edifice, remained closed and barricaded.