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16 despaired of making anything further of him. The most fiendish tortures had failed, so they strangled the hapless and heroic sufferer, and burnt him at the stake on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh, on a Saturday in the end of January, 1591. This is only one specimen of Scotch Calvinism's attitude to sorcery; hundreds more could be given as inhuman and terrible.

Turning to Puritan England, I have time for only the briefest reference to a poor English girl, named Samuel, who, along with her aged father and mother, were burnt at the stake. On her way to execution some spectators, melted into compassion by her youth and beauty, and anxious to save her from the horrible doom that awaited her, suggested to her that she should allege she was pregnant-perhaps the only plea that, under the circumstances, would have respited her from the flames. That poor peasant girl's reply should be kept in everlasting remembrance to the honour of her country and of womankind. Her young life was sweet to her, and the flames to which she was being led were terrible. But she indignantly refused to put in the plea which was suggested to her. Virtually she exclaimed: "Rather than shame give me torture; rather than dishonour give me death!"

Sir Samuel Cromwell, lord of the manor at Warbois, where this heroic girl and her father and mother were burnt at the stake, having received the sum of forty pounds out of the estate of the poor persons who suffered, turned it into a rent charge of forty shillings yearly for the endowment of an annual sermon on the subject of witchcraft to be preached by a doctor or bachelor of divinity of Queen's College, Cambridge. And this sermon by a Cambridge D.D. is; for aught I know, preached annually till this day, as an insult to the memory of a humble village maiden of two hundred and odd years ago, to whom the women of England should raise a statue; and, if the metal cannot conveniently be found elsewhere, let them melt down the statues of our trumpery princes and kings, who blocked the path of progress when alive and block the way of our street traffic when dead!