The Witch of Prague by F. Marion Crawford

Read "The Witch of Prague" by F. Marion Crawford online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.

[*] The deeds here described were done in Prague on the twenty-first day of February in the year 1694. Lazarus and his accomplice Levi Kurtzhandel, or Brevimanus, or "the short-handed," were betrayed by their own people. Lazarus hanged himself in prison, and Levi suffered death by the wheel -- repentant, it is said, and himself baptized. A full account of the trial, written in Latin, was printed, and a copy of it may be seen in the State Museum in Prague. The body of Simon Abeles was exhumed and rests in the Teyn Kirche, in the chapel on the left of the high altar. The slight extension of certain scenes not fully described in the Latin volume will be pardoned in a work of fiction.

Unorna's voice sank from the tone of anger to a lower pitch. She spoke quietly and very distinctly as though to impress every word upon the ear of the man who was in her power. The Wanderer listened, too, scarcely comprehending at first, but slowly yielding to the influence she exerted until the vision rose before him also with all its moving scenes, in all its truth and in all its horror. As in a dream the deeds that had been passed before him, the desolate burial-ground was peopled with forms and faces of other days, the gravestones rose from the earth and piled themselves into gloomy houses and remote courts and dim streets and venerable churches, the dry and twisted trees shrank down, and broadened and swung their branches as arms, and drew up their roots out of the ground as feet under them and moved hither and thither.

Reading navigation