us, and we put them betwixt our feet and say horse and hillock in the devil's name. And when any see these straws in a whirlwind and do not sanctify themselves, we may shoot them dead at our pleasure."[1] When they kill people, she goes on to say, the souls escape them "but their bodies remain with us and will fly as horses to us all as small as straws." It is plain that it is the "airy body" they take possession of; those "animal spirits" perhaps which Henry More thought to be the link between soul and body and the seat of all vital function. The trials were more unjust than those of England, where there was a continual criticism from sceptics; torture was used again and again to distort confessions, and innocent people certainly suffered; some who had but believed too much in their own dreams and some who had but cured the sick at some vision's prompting. Alison Pearson who was burnt in 1588 might have been Biddy Early or any other knowledgeable woman in Ireland today. She was convicted "for haunting and repairing with the Good Neighbours and queen of Elfhame, these divers years and bypast, as she had confessed in her depositions, declaring that she could not say readily how long she was with them; and that she had friends in that court who were of her own blood and who had great acquaintance of the queen of Elfhame. That when she went to bed she never knew where she would be carried before dawn." When they worked cures they had the same doctrine of the penalty that one finds in Lady Gregory's stories. One who made her confession before James I. was convicted for "taking the sick party's pains and sicknesses upon herself for a time and then translating them to a third person." II There are more women than men mediums today; and there have been or seem to have been more witches than wizards. The wizards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries relied more upon their conjuring book than the witches whose visions and experiences seem but half voluntary, and when voluntary called up by some childish rhyme: Hare, hare, God send thee care; I am in a hare's likeness now, But I shall be a woman even now; Hare, hare, God send thee care.