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in little holes; so neatly, that they could not be well perceived, till by the turning of a cock, they did sprout over interchangeably, from side to side, above man's height, in forms of arches, without any intersection or meeting aloft, because the pipes were not exactly opposite; so as the beholder, besides that which was fluent in the aqueduct on both hands in his view, did walk as it were under a continual bower and hemisphere of water, without any drop falling on him; an invention for refreshment, surely far excelling all the Alexandrian delicacies, and pnuematicks of Hero."* An invention of greater solace could not have been desired in the canicular days, by those who sought shelter from the heat; nor more coveted by any than by him, who is constrained to supply the "every-day" demand of "warm" friends for this little work-no "cool" task!

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Witchcraft.

St.

On Tuesday, the 30th of July, 1751, Thomas Colley, William Humbles, and Charles Young, otherwise Lee, otherwise Red Beard, were tried at Hertford for the murder of Ruth Osborne, by drowning her in a pond at Marlston-green, in the parish of Tring. The trial is exceedingly curious. It appeared that William Dell, the town crier of Hamel-Hempstead, on the 18th of April preceding, was desired by one Nichols, who gave him a piece of paper and fourpence, to cry the words at the market-place that were wrote thereon, which he accordingly did. The paper was as follows:-"This is to give notice, that on Monday next, a man and woman are to be publicly ducked at Tring, in this county, for their wicked crimes."

Matthew Barton, the overseer of Tring, on hearing that this had been cried at Winslow, Leighton-Buzzard, and HamelHempstead, in order to prevent the out

Reliq. Wotton.

rage, and believing them to be very honest people, sent them into the workhouse. On the Monday, a large mob of 5,000 people and more, assembled at Tring; but Jonathan Tomkins, master of the workhouse, in the middle of the night, had removed them into the vestry-room adjoining the church. The mob rushed in and ransacked the workhouse, and all the closets, boxes, and trunks; they pulled down a wall, and also pulled out the windows and window-frames. Some of the mob perceiving straw near at hand said, let us get the straw, and set fire to the house, and burn it down. Some cried out and swore, that they would not only burn the workhouse down, but the whole town of Tring to ashes. Tomkins being apprehensive that they would do so told them where the two unhappy people were, they immediately went to the vestry-room, broke it open, and took the two people away in great triumph.

John Holmes deposed, that the man and woman were separately tied up in a cloth or sheet; that a rope was tied under the arm-pits of the deceased, and two men dragged her into the pond; that the men were one on one side of the pond, and the other on the other; and they dragged her sheer through the pond several times; and that Colley, having a stick in his hand, went into the pond, and turned the deceased up and down several times.

John Humphries deposed, that Colley turned her over and over several times with the stick; that after the mob had ducked her several times, they brought her to the shore, and set her by the pond side, and then dragged the old man in and ducked him; that after they had brought him to shore, and set him by the pond side, they dragged the deceased in a second time; and that Colley went again into the pond, and turned and pushed the deceased about with his stick as before; that then she being brought to shore again, the man was also a second time dragged in, and underwent the same discipline as he had before; and being brought to shore, the deceased was a third time dragged into the pond; that Colley went into the pond again, and took hold of the cloth or sheet in which she was wrapt, and pulled her up and down the pond till the same came from off her, and then she appeared naked; that then Colley pushed her on the breast with his stick, which she endeavoured with her left hand to catch hold of, but

he pulled it away, and that was the last time life was in her. He also deposed, that after Colley came out of the pond, he went round among the people who were the spectators of this tragedy, and collected money of them as a reward for the great pains he had taken in showing them sport in ducking the old witch, as he then called the deceased.

The jury found the prisoner Colley -guilty.

The reporter of the trial states, from the mouth of John Osborne, the following particulars not deposed to in court, namely that as soon as the mob entered the vestry-room, they seized him and his wife, and Red Beard carried her across his shoulders, like a calf, upwards of two miles, to a place called Gubblecut; where not finding a pond they thought convenient, they then carried them to Marlstongreen, and put them into separate rooms in a house there; that they there stripped him naked, and crossed his legs and arms, and bent his body so, that his right thumb came down to his right great toe, and his left thumb to his left great toe, and then tied each thumb and great toe together; that after they had so done, they got a cloth, or an old sheet, and wrapped round him, and then carried him to the Mere on the green, where he underwent the discipline as has been related in the course of the trial. What they did with his wife he could not say, but he supposed they had stripped her, and tied her in the same manner as himself, as she appeared naked in the pond when the sheet was drawn from off her, and her thumbs and toes tied as his were. After the mob found the woman was dead, they carried him to a house, and put him into a bed, and laid his dead wife by his side; all which he said he was insensible of, having been so ill-used in the pond, as not to have any sense of the world for some time; but that he was well assured it was so, a number of people since informing him of it who were present. His wife, if she had lived till Michaelmas, would have been seventy years of age; he himself was but fifty-six.

The infatuation of the people in those parts of Hertfordshire was so great, in thinking that these people were a witch and a vizard, that when any cattle died, t was always said that Osborne and his

deceased wife had bewitched them. And even after the trial, a great number of people in that part of the country thought the man a vizard, and that he could cast up pins as fast as he pleased. Thoug' a stout able man of his age, and ready and willing to work, yet none of the farmers thereabouts would employ him, ridiculously believing him to be a vizard, so that the parish of Tring were obliged to support him in their workhouse after his wife's death.

So far is reported by the editor of the trial.

On the 24th of August, 1751, Colley was hung at Gubblecut-cross, and afterwards in chains. Multitudes would not be spectators of his death; yet many thousands stood at a distance to see him

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die, muttering that it was a hard case to hang a man for destroying an old wicked woman that had done so much mischief by her withcraft." Yet Colley himself had signed a public declaration the day before, wherein he affirmed his conviction as a dying man, that there was no such a thing as a witch, and prayed that the "good people" might refrain from thinking that they had any right to persecute a fellow-creature, as he had done, through a vain imagination, and under the influence of liquor: he acknowledged his cruelty, and the justice of his sentence.*

The pond wherein this poor creature lost her life was in mud and water together not quite two feet and a half in depth, and yet her not sinking was deemed "confirmation strong as proof of holy writ" that she was a witch. Ignorance is mental blindness.

FLORAL DIRECTORY.

White Mullen. Verbuscum Lychnitis Dedicated to St. Julitta.

July 31.

St. Ignatius, of Loyola, A. D. 1556. St John Columbini, A. D. 1367. St. Helen, of Sweden, A. D. 1160.

Gent. Mag. xxi. 378.

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St. Ignatius Loyola-Founder of the Jesuits.

Ignatius was born in 1495, in the castle of Loyola in Guipuscoa, a part of Biscay adjoining the Pyrenees. In his childhood he was pregnant of wit, discreet above his years, affable and obliging, with a choleric disposition, and an ardent passion for glory. Bred in the court of Ferdinand V., under the duke of Najara, his kinsman and patron, as page to the king, he was introduced into the army, wherein he signalized himself by dexterous talent, personal courage, addiction to licentious vices and pleasures,

and a taste for poetry; he at that time composed a poem in praise of St. Peter. In 1521, he served in the garrison of Pampeluna, against the French who besieged it: in resisting an attack, he mounted the breach sword-in-hand; a piece of stone struck off by a cannon ball from the ramparts bruised his left leg, while the ball in its rebound broke his right.

Dr. Southey in a note to his recently

Butler's Saints.

published "Tale of Paraguay," cites the Jesuit Ribadeneira's account of this accident to Ignatius from his life of him in the "Acta Sanctorum," where it is somewhat more at length than in the English edition of Ribadeneira's "Lives of the Saints," which states that St. Peter appeared to Ignatius on the eve of his feast, with a sweet and gracious aspect, and said that he was come to cure him. "With this visitation of the holy apostle," says Ribadeneira, "Ignatius grew much better, and not long after recovered his perfect health: but, as he was a spruce young gallant, desirous to appear in the most neat and comely fashion, he caused the end of a bone which stuck out under

his knee, and did somewhat disfigure his leg, to be cut off, that so his boot might sit more handsomely, as he himself told me, thinking it to be against his honour that such a deformity should be in his leg: nor would he be bound while the bone was sawed off." Father Bouhours, also a Jesuit, and another biographer of Ignatius, says, that one of his thighs having shrunk from the wound, lest lameness should appear in his gait, he put himself for many days together upon a kind of rack, and with an engine of iron violently stretched and drew out his leg, yet he could never extend it, and ever after his right leg remained shorter than his left.

When long care

Restored his shattered leg and set hiin free,
He would not brook a slight deformity,
As one who being gay and debonair,

In courts conspicuous, as in camps must be :
So he forsooth a shapely boot must wear;
And the vain man, with peril of his life,

Laid the recovered limb again beneath the knife.

Long time upon the bed of pain he lay
Whiling with books the weary hours away.
And from that circumstance, and this vain man,
A train of long events their course began,
Whose term it is not given us yet to see.
Who hath not heard Loyola's sainted name,
Before whom kings and nations bow'd the knee?

Ribadeneira says, that one night while Ignatius kept his bed and was praying, a great noise shook all the chamber and broke the windows, and the Virgin Mary appeared to him "when he was awake, with her precious Son in her arms;" in consequence of this vision he resolved to embrace a life wherein he might afflict his body. For this purpose, he determined to go a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and bought a cassock of coarse canvass for a coat, a pair of country buskins, a bottle, and a pilgrim's staff; he gave his horse to the monastery of our blessed lady at Montserrat; hung up his sword and dagger at our lady's altar; and having spent the night of Lady-day, 1522, at the said altar, departed to institute the Society of Jesus, in his canvass coat, girded with his cord, walking with his pilgrim's staff bare-headed he would have gone barefooted but he was forced to wear one shoe on the foot of the broken leg. Thus he went,

:

"One shoe off, And t'other shoe on

Tale of Paraguay.

till he came to the hospital of St. Lucy at Manresa, where he lived by begging among the poor, and exhausting his body, not paring his nails, letting the hair of his head and beard both grow, and never using a comb; sleeping on a board or the bare ground; passing the greater part of the night in watching, praying, and weeping; scourging himself three times a day, and spending seven hours upon his knees. Ribadeneira says, "he was so set upon curbing, and taming, and mortifying his flesh, that he allowed it no manner of ease or content, but was continually persecuting it, so that in a very short time from a strong lusty man, he became weak and infirm." In 1523, he was so feeble and weak that he could hardly set one leg before the other; where the night overtook him, whether in the fields or high-road, there he lay; till at last, as well as he could, often falling and rising again, he made a shift to reach Rome, on Palm Sunday, where he "made the holy stations," and visited the churches, and after remaining there fifteen days, begged

his way from door to door to Venice, afterwards went to Cyprus, and arrived at Jerusalem on the 4th of September. He returned from thence in the depth of winter, through frost and snow, with scarcely clothes to cover him, and arriving at Cyprus, wanted to ship himself on board a Venetian man of war, but the captain disliking his appearance said, if he was a saint, as he said he was, he might securely walk upon the water and not fear to be drowned. Ignatius, how ever, did not take the hint and set sail upon his coat or a millstone, as other saints are said to have done, but embarked in "a little paltry vessel, quite rotten and worm-eaten," which carried him to Venice in January, 1524 On his way from thence to Genoa, he was taken by the Spaniards who thought him a spy, and afterwards thought him a fool; when he got to Spain, at thirty-three years of age, he began to learn grammar, fasted as he did before, cut off the soles of his shoes that he might walk barefoot, and cut down a man that had hanged himself, who, through his prayers "returned to life." At Paris, in 1528, he thought fit to perfect himself in the Latin tongue, and "humanity;" then, also, he studied philosophy and divinity, and made journies into Flanders and England to beg alms of the Spanish merchants, where with he got together a fraternity under the name of the Fathers of the Society of Jesus, whom he persuaded John III. of Portugal to send to the East Indies as missionaries. He afterwards increased the number, and retired with two of his order for forty days into a ruined and desolate hermitage without doors or windows, open on all sides to wind and rain, where they slept on the ground on a little straw, and lived by begging hard mouldy crusts, which they were obliged to steep in water before they could eat: they then went to Rome on foot, begging all the way. Before entering that city, Ignatius going into an old church alone, had, according to Ribadeneira's account, a celestial interview of a nature that cannot be here described without violence to the feelings of the reader. After the removal of certain difficulties, the pope confirmed the order of the Jesuits, and Ignatius was unanimously elected its general. He entered upon his dignity by taking upon himself the office of cook, and doing other menial services about the house," which he executed," says

Ribadeneira, "with that readiness and desire of contempt, that he seemed a novice employed therein for his profit and mortification: all this I myself can testify, who at that time being a youth, was a scholar and brother in the society, and every day repeated St. Ignatius's catechism. Our blessed father St. Ignatius was general of the society fifteen years, three months, and nine days, from the 22d of April in the year 1541, unti the last of July, 1556, when he departed this world."

Ribadeneira largely diffuses on the austerities of Ignatius, in going almost naked, suffering hunger and cold, self-inflictions with a whip, hair-cloth, "and all manner of mortifications that he could invent to afflict and subdue his body." He accounts among his virtues, that Ignatius lived in hospitals like a poor man, amongst the meanest sort of people, being despised and contemned, and desirous to be so: his desire was to be mocked and laughed at by all, and if he would have permitted himself to be carried on by the fervour of his mind, he would have gone up and down the streets almost naked, and like a fool, that the boys of the town might have made sport with him, and thrown dirt upon him. He had a singular gift of tears which he shed most abundantly at his prayers, to the great comfort of his spirit and no less damage to his body, but at length, because the doctors told him so continual an effusion did impair his health, he prayed for command over his tears, and afterwards he could shed or repress his tears as he pleased.

It is especially insisted on by Ribadeneira, that "Ignatius had a strange dominion and command over the devils, who abhorred and persecuted him as their greatest enemy. Whilst he was in his rigorous course of penance at Manresa, Satan often appeared to him in a shining and glistening form, but he discovered the enemy's fraud and deceit. Several other times, the devil appeared to him in some ugly and foul shape, which he was so little terrified with, that he would contemptibly drive him away with his staff, like a cat, or some troublesome cur. He laboured all he could one day to terrify him, whilst he lived at Alcala, in the hospital, but he lost his labour. At Rome, he would have choked him in his sleep, and he was so hoarse, and his throat so sore, with the violence the

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