Witches showed their spite by causing the object of it to waste away in a long and painful disease, with a sensation of thorns stuck in the flesh. Sometimes they caused their victims to swallow pins, old nails, dirt, and trash of all sorts, invisibly conveyed to them by their imps. Frequently they showed their hate by drying up the milk of cows, or by killing oxen. For slight offences they would prevent butter from coming in the churn, or beer from working. Grace Greenwood says, that, on a visit to Salem in the fall of 1850, she "was shown a vial of the veritable bewitched pins with which divers persons were sorely pricked by the wicked spite of certain witches and wizards." It was believed that Satan affixed his mark or seal to the bodies of those in allegiance with him, and that the spot where this mark was made became callous and dead. In examining a witch upon trial, they would pierce the body with pins, and if any spot was found insensible to the torture, it was looked upon as ocular demonstration of guilt. Another method to detect a witch, was to weigh her against the church Bible. If she was guilty, the Bible would preponderate. Another was by making her say the Lord's prayer, which no one actually possessed could do correctly. A witch could not weep but three tears, and that only out of the left eye; and this was considered by many an decisive proof of guilt. But swimming was the most infallible ordeal. They were stripped naked, and bound the right thumb to the left toe, and the left thumb to the right toe. Being thus prepared, they were thrown into a pond or river. If guilty, they could not sink; for having, by their compact with the devil, renounced the water of baptism, that element renounces them, and refuses to receive them into its bosom. In 1664, a man by the name of Matthew Hopkins, in England, was permitted to explore the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Huntingdon, with a commission to discover witches, receiving twenty shillings from each town he visited. Many persons were pitched upon, and through his means convicted. At length, some gentlemen, out of indignation at his barbarity, tied him in the same manner he had bound others, thumbs and toes together, in which state, putting him in the water, he swam! Standing condemned on his own principles, the country was rescued from the power of his malicious imposition. The subsequent illustration of the condition of religion less than two hundred years ago will excite a few humbling thoughts. In the parish register of Glammis, Scotland, June, 1676, is recorded--"Nae preaching here this Lord's day, the minister being at Gortachy, burning a witch." Forty thousand persons, it is said, were put to death for witchcraft in England during the seventeenth century, and a much greater number in Scotland, in proportion to its population.