What, therefore, is the probability that these five girls, with any great frequency or regularity, went to and returned home from avowedly sportive or necromantic meetings _at the parsonage_? Each of them would have to travel, in going and returning, not less than five or six miles, mostly along separate routes, in winter's shortest days, by lonely and crooked roads, through miles of dark forests, over winter's snows, and amid its freezing airs. What is the probability that such persons, so circumstanced, would either desire to go, or be permitted by parents and employers to go, frequently and regularly to such meetings? Slight--very slight--because both natural and domestic obstacles must have been great. Were horses, vehicles, and drivers, or were even saddle-horses, regularly at the command of such girls for conveyance to and from such meetings? Would such persons, if physically strong and courageous enough to go on foot, be often spared by their employers to spend long winter evenings, and two hours more for travel, in practicing "fortune-telling, necromancy, and magic"? Such questions of themselves put forth a negative answer. Frequent attendance by such members of the circle was next to an impossibility. If they learned much upon any subject at the very few meetings which circumstances would permit them to attend in the short space of two months, they were very apt pupils indeed. That they became very considerably modified and unfolded in certain directions in consequence of meeting together occasionally is very credible.