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of their age if they had not sought to juggle with the powers of darkness; but there seems to have been what was, in the eyes of the Inquisition, even a darker suspicion against them that of heresy. And then they confessed. At first, and apparently voluntarily, they avowed that they had amassed their fortune by these magic arts; then, under torture, that they were the devil's own bankers. That they had paid over two thousand crowns to Roulet was never doubted, nor does it ever seem to have been denied. One would be curious to know what form the devil's signature took. The draft was not produced in court. But we know that two years before, in the case of a miserable man named Jourdain, who confessed that he had made a compact with the devil to steal a consecrated host, the actual document was exhibited, signed with blood drawn from Jourdain's left breast and the little finger of his left hand.

At this point we find a proof of the struggle to temper fanaticism with justice, which marks many of these cases. The court at Vesoul sent the case to be tried by the Parliament at Dôle, partly no doubt on account of the position of the accused, but also for the sake of changing the venue: "Because the people of Vesoul were extremely incensed against sorcerers; for one day, before the last vintage, there fell such abundance of hailstones from heaven that not only the fruit was spoiled, but even the hedges were broken and beaten

down." And what could be more opportune for moneylending wizards who made advances at usurious interest to the vine-growers thus ruined by their own magic arts?

At Dôle, however, the Dorladys fared no better than at Vesoul. The testimony against them must have been strong, for even that Parliament was not altogether unreasonable: 8 few years later it refused to accept the nomination of the fanatic Boguet as "conseiller," and thereby broke his heart, as he well deserved. The dossier of the case has apparently been destroyed, as were many such records, when a more reasonable age became ashamed of the criminal follies of its predecessors. But the detailed story is extant in pamphlet form, and we have the actual decree of the Parliament of Dôle, dated February 6, 1610: "The court having considered the charge brought and now pending against Manfredo Dorlady and Francesco Dorlady, his son, and the accusation brought by Georges Roulet, and the attestation of the same by a religious father, .. has condemned and condemns them to make honourable amends before the great church at Vesoul, and thence to be conveyed to the place of ordinary justice and to be fastened on a woodpile expressly erected by the executor of high justice, and there burned till their bodies be reduced to ashes." The mockery of an amende honorable was apparently intended

for the good of the victims' souls-a poor consolation.

Now, what had happened in truth? It is certain that Roulet, a rascal to whom no one would have lent a penny, had suddenly become possessed of what was to him wealth. It seems also certain that this was connected with the Dorladys. Was it hush - money extorted from them? Did they pay it to silence, as they fancied, the utterance of popular indignation against their usuries? Possibly Roulet had been one of their victims, and threatened to make his wrongs known. Or had he found out something of their dabbling with necromancy and terrified them into believing that he was a real emissary of Satan? Or, lastly, was this blackmail levied from suspected Lutheran heretics?

The psychological problems

indicated in these few pages are full of interest, and in some instances a solution may be hazarded. The well-authenticated stories of the circulation of news of events in distant countries (as in the case of Torralba), almost at the moment of their happening, suggests telepathic communication of no ordinary nature. The unanimous accounts of purely fabulous happenings given by independent witnesses, of which the affair of the children of Elfdal affords the best example, seems to involve mental suggestion of some kind. There are cases of so-called "bewitchment," in which hypnotisation certainly played a part. But one mystery remains unsolved, and will ever remain so. Why did the Dorladys cash the devil's cheque ?

A. T. S. GOODRICK.

DOURO VINEYARDS.

Of the thousands who drink the wine of the Douro perhaps not many hundreds have visited the country whence it comes. But for those who have, there is ever afterwards an added savour in the glass of port which brings back to memory the life of the mountain vineyards. People who know the cheerful fields of Burgundy and Champagne would find as great a difference between them and this province of northern Portugal as lies between the light French wines and a vintage port.

The wine shipped from Oporto is made in a region of fierce heats and barren hills, where the sun beats into the narrow valleys and is caught and held between their stony sides until the grapes blacken on the terraces, and the yearlong round of labour culminates in the gathering in September.

Never for an instant can one lose sight of that crowning moment of the year. But for the vintage there would be little life in this furnace of a valley, along the shores of the sulky river, where trout or salmon never come. But because the wine in the Quinta cellars is only brought to its perfection among the Douro rocks, the Douro people live their lives of ceaseless work and watchfulness against their vines' enemies, disease, and floods, and winter storms.

Eighty miles of river run between the vineyards and the

The traveller who leaves Oporto in the midday heat sees the sun go down before he reaches the villages of the Alto Douro. On the April night on which we came to them it was quite dark when the train set us down and went upon its way towards the Spanish frontier.

When visitors come to the Douro, it is not to inns, but as guests, that they come. A happy fate, as all must know who have acquaintance with the Quintas built among the vineyards. As we stepped out from the station, carrying lanterns in our hands, a breath of hot wind blew into our faces the smell of eucalyptus trees. The moon rose, the ripples on the river shone in its light, and we could dimly see the tops of many hills. So began the fairy tale of life in the valley of the Douro.

On other nights we took that road again, coming home by the light of moon and stars, but it was never quite so full of magic as on the first evening when we followed the dancing lanterns, and guessed at the shapes of unknown things.

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loved it already. It drew us to the terrace garden of the Quinta. The river flowed below, and all the slopes of its narrow valley were ribbed with the vineyards which had sent us their enchanting song. From the barred windows near the ground, below the living-rooms of the house, came the curious acrid smell of the young wine, waiting there in the Quinta cellars for its journey down to the Wine Lodges at Oporto. There was already an early visitor, a Portuguese winegrower from over the hill, come on business with our host. While we breakfasted, we drinking coffee and he wine, he told the news of the district. In the past fortnight, he said, there had been two assassinations, one the result of a quarrel about a sum of money, the other an affair concerning a piece of ground. The vines were doing well. Nothing, in fact, had happened lately; but Senhor Carvalho, when we saw him, would tell us more about the murders if we wished it. He knew more about such events than any other man. Through knowing Carvalho, it seemed that one might also learn a little about this region in which men's deaths made no stir. We heard more of him. Manager of the vineyards up and down the valley belonging to our host, he had more in his charge than the culture of vines. One almost came to believe that the lawless Douro was ruled by Carvalho. It is certain that whenever justice thrust its way among the mountains, its forces were summoned up by him. Every

thing that happened in all the countryside was known to him. When evil-doing transgressed Douro standards, it was he who summoned the police to come up the valley and remove the offenders. But in his vineyards there was always peace, for he took the knives and pistols which the labourers bring with them to the vintage, to hang them up upon the walls of the Quinta, and the wild people with whom he dealt so fearlessly rewarded him with confidence and affection.

At midday he came, to go with us up the river to the vineyard some miles above. Walking along the road, his large smile was ready for every one who passed. Towards us came a country cart. The centuries since Virgil wrote of such another have not changed the pattern of its axletrees and wattle-top. Carvalho stopped it, and the driver, putting down his goad of quince-wood, lifted the enormous leather frontals off the foreheads of the oxen, to show how they carried the weight. In that and other of its ways the Douro has not departed from the teaching of the Roman Conquerors more than two thousand years ago. The solid wheels went creaking on their way, and we kept ours along the road leading to the river.

It passed under deep eaves of houses, where swallows, just returned to their last year's nests, were settling in with much advertisement. Carvalho pointed to a mark high above his head on the wall.

"The Douro was there in December," he said. It was

fifty yards at least from the river-bank, and such a thing seemed incredible even for the flood which was a record for damage and disaster.

The Douro is no mean stream at its quietest, but full of deep pools and dangerous rapids. Embarked on it in one of the wide flat boats which carry the wine to Oporto, the current swept us far down in the crossing. On the other bank a path led up among little stumps of sprouting vines, and then over other hills where vines were not, and the ground was greener with crops and flowers, under the shade of olivetrees. Irises came up among the stones, wild lavender grew in clumps, and many other plants for which Carvalho had names which left us none the wiser. There, too, were Judas - trees in blossom, the special glory of Portugal in spring - time. Through the length of the land they fling their petals over the wall of every man's garden, are planted in avenues in the public places of cities, or stand alone in woods and fields, beautiful everywhere, but never more 80 than when their crimson branches glow among the brown hills of the Douro. Sometimes we dipped into glens where burns ran among gorse bushes, or climbed long slopes on which the sun of April beat with force which made one speculate with horror upon his capacities in September.

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We had left the main valley where river, road, and railway, side by side, link the Douro with the the world, and were were

among the hills which flank it. In the midst of them lay a village, as brown as the wing of a partridge. Men's dwellings here had no more brought with them the touch of civilisation than if they had been the lairs of the wolves who still haunt these mountains. Hovels and pig-styes alike abutted on the path, and from dark thresholds voices greeted Carvalho.

"Many assassins live here," said he to us, smiling upon them.

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Assassinos," in our conversation with him, had come to mean the perpetrators of all the crimes which the Douro recognised. To such villages as this they retired, to live undisturbed. All were apparently delighted to see Carvalho. One envied a social order SO uncomplicated by qualms of conscience.

The sun was still high in the sky when we said farewell to the friendly assassinos, and returned to the sandy shores of the river. Carvalho always seemed to divine the moment when hunger or weariness would begin to interfere with our pleasure in his Douro. There was a day once when we had wandered with him all through a hot afternoon among vineyards, where long rows of labourers were bending over their slow unceasing toil, loosening the earth round the vine roots. The landscape seemed to hold nothing which was not scorched and dry. But over the hill's edge was an orange grove where the grass grew thick and high in the shade of boughs bending to the ground under the weight of their fruit.

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