But the interests are varied. How full of grotesque and curious horrors are the prosecutions for witchcraft! There is that one, for instance, in March 1665 at Bury St. Edmunds before Sir Matthew Hale, with stories of bewitched children, and plague-stricken women, and satanic necromancy. Again, there is the diverting exposure of Richard Hathaway in 1702, and how the rogue pretended to vomit pins and abstain from meat or drink for quite miraculous periods. But most of those things I deal with elsewhere in this volume. The trials of obscurer criminals have their own charm. Where else do you find such Dutch pictures of long-vanished interiors or exteriors? You touch the _vie intime_ of a past age; you see how kitchen and hall lived and talked; what master and man, mistress and maid thought and felt; how they were dressed, what they ate, of what they gossiped. Again, how oft your page recalls the strange, mad, picturesque ways of old English law! _Benefit of clergy_ meets you at every turn, the _Peine Fort et Dure_ is explained with horrible minuteness, the lore of _Ship Money_ as well as of _Impressment of Seamen_ is all there. Also is an occasional touch of farce. But what phase of man’s life goes unrecorded in those musty old tomes? Howell’s collection only comes down to 1820. Reform has since then purged our law, and the whole set is packed off to the Lumber Room. In a year’s current reports you may find the volumes quoted once or twice, but that is “but a bravery,” as Lord Bacon would say, for their law is “a creed outworn.” Yet the human interest of a story remains, however antiquated the setting, incapable of hurt from Act of Parliament. So, partly for themselves, partly as samples of the bulk, I here present in altered form two of these tragedies, a Pair of Parricides: one Scots of the seventeenth, the other English of the eighteenth century. The first is the case of Philip Standsfield, tried at Edinburgh, in 1688, for the murder of his father, Sir James Standsfield, of New Mills, in East Lothian. To-day New Mills is called Amisfield; it lies on the south bank of the Tyne, a mile east of Haddington. There is a fine mansion-house about a century old in the midst of a well wooded park, and all round are the superbly tilled Lothian fields, as _dulcia arva_ as ever the Mantuan sang. Amisfield got its present name thus: Colonel Charteris, infamed (in the phrase of Arbuthnot’s famous epitaph) for the “undeviating pravity of his manners” (hence lashed by Pope in many a stinging line), purchased it early in the last century and re-named it from the seat of his family in Nithsdale. Through him it passed by descent to the house of Wemyss, still its owners. Amongst its trees and its waters the place lies away from the beaten track and is now as charmingly peaceful a spot as you shall anywhere discover. Name gone and aspect changed, local tradition has but a vague memory of the two-centuries-old tragedy whereof it was the centre.