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At this time the laws against witchcraft had become practically a dead
letter, but it was not till 1735 that they were repealed. Still, the
abolition of the legal penalty did not kill the popular belief in the
power and reality of witchcraft; and even now, at this present day, we
find proof every now and again in newspaper reports that this belief
still lingers among certain classes. Within these fifty years, in a
village a little to the west of Glasgow, lived an old woman, who was not
poor, but had a very irritable temper, and was unsocial in her habits. A
little boy having called her names and otherwise annoyed her, she
scolded him, and, in the heat of her rage, prophesied that before a
twelvemonth elapsed the devil would get his own. A few months after this
the boy sickened and died, and the villagers had no hesitation in
ascribing the cause of death to this old woman. Again, a farmer in the
neighbourhood had bought a horse, and in the evening a servant was
leading it to the water to drink, when this same old woman, who was
sitting near at hand, remarked upon the beauty of the horse, and asked
for a few hairs from the tail, which the servant with some roughness
refused.
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