sufficiently proved that Law's affliction was nothing more than what would now be termed paralysis of the lower extremities. In his _Introduction_ to _Potts's Discovery of Witches_, Mr. Crossley observes that "the main interest in reviewing this miserable band of victims will be felt to centre in Alice Nutter. Wealthy, well conducted, well connected, and placed probably on an equality with most of the neighbouring families, and the magistrate before whom she was brought and by whom she was committed, she deserves to be distinguished from the companions with whom she suffered, and to attract an attention which has never yet been directed to her. That James Device, on whose evidence she was convicted, was instructed to accuse her by her own nearest relatives, and that the magistrate, Roger Nowell, entered actively as a confederate into the conspiracy, from a grudge entertained against her on account of a long-disputed boundary, are allegations which tradition has preserved, but the truth or falsehood of which, at this distance of time, it is scarcely possible satisfactorily to examine. Her mansion, Rough Lee, is still standing, a very substantial and rather fine specimen of the houses of the inferior gentry, _temp._ James I., but now divided into cottages." THE SAMLESBURY WITCHES. The trials of these persons took place at the same assizes, and before the same judge. Against Jane and Ellen Bierley and Jane Southworth, all of Samlesbury, charged with having bewitched Grace Sowerbutts there, the only material evidence was that of Grace Sowerbutts herself, a girl of licentious and vagrant habits, who swore that these women (one of them being her grandmother), did draw her by the hair of the head and lay her upon the top of a hay-mow, and did take her senses and memory from her; that they appeared to her sometimes in their own likeness, and sometimes like a black dog. She declared that they by their arts had induced her to join their sisterhood; and that they were met from time to time by "four black things going upright and yet not like men in the face," who conveyed them across the Ribble, where they danced with them, &c. The prisoners were also charged with bewitching and slaying a child of Thomas Walshman's, by placing a nail in its navel; and after its burial, they took up the corpse, when they ate part of the flesh, and made an "_unxious_ ointment" by boiling the bones. This was more than even the capacious credulity of the judge and jury could digest. The Samlesbury witches were, therefore, acquitted, and a seminary priest named Thompson _alias_ Southworth, was suspected by two of the county magistrates [the Rev. William Leigh and Edward Chisnall, Esq.,] to whom the affair was afterwards referred, of having instigated Sowerbutts to make the charge; but this imputation was not supported by any satisfactory evidence. WITCHCRAFT AT MIDDLETON.