Among savage peoples, as the primitive tribes of Africa and the American aborigines, the man who can dispel disease by a fetich--the great medicine-man of a tribe--has always been regarded with a feeling of combined jealousy, suspicion, and fear; but, because of the occult powers he is supposed to control, fear predominates and passes into a form of reverence. Not so, however, in the case of woman, of whom we write; she was looked upon as having forfeited, to an extent, her claims upon humanity by her original alliance with Satan, and, being outside of the pale of God's grace, or sustaining only a permissive relationship to it, it was deemed a pious, a safe, and a creditable thing to mete out to her the divine dispensation of wrath. Thus again, amid numerous instances of woman's suffering as a penalty for her sex, we have the occurrence of woman being persecuted unto death because of her compassion. It was not regarded as despicable for the very person who had been succored by her in the hour of sickness to turn informant and declare that he or she had been healed by diabolical agency, and, whether under the influence of an honest hallucination, or simply actuated by a malicious propensity, to declare that evil spirits had actually been conjured up in human form and been seen by the eyes of the sufferer. Women were not blameless in the matter of their reputation for possessing occult knowledge and having diabolical relations; for there were many women who, being morally not beyond reproach, separated themselves from society as they grew older, and resorted to medicinal knowledge and magic for a living and to maintain in the public eye the position of unenviable notoriety of which they had become morbidly fond. It gratified such natures to be reputed to possess the power--which even philosophers ascribed to them--of, at certain seasons, turning milk sour, making dogs rabid, and producing other such freakish manifestations. They were considered to be able not only to heal sickness, but to cause it; and the presence in one's clothing of a pin whose irritant end was pointed in the wrong direction was sufficient to make the person believe that he was under a spell of witchcraft. If a cow or a horse fell lame, it was the village witch who did it; if a child developed as an imbecile, or anyone became bereft of reason, it was laid at the door of the witch; the failure of crops, a drought,--anything that interfered with the comfort or convenience of a person or a community,--was due to some such representative of Satan.