Gay enough in her youth, she had, like a
true Southern woman, taken to superstition in her old age; and spent her
days in the churches, leaving Torfrida to do and learn what she would. Her
nurse, moreover, was a Lapp woman, carried off in some pirating foray, and
skilled in all the sorceries for which the Lapps were famed throughout the
North. Her uncle, partly from good-nature, partly from a pious hope that
she might "enter religion," and leave her wealth to the Church, had made
her his pupil, and taught her the mysteries of books; and she had proved
to be a strangely apt scholar. Grammar, rhetoric, Latin prose and poetry,
such as were taught in those days, she mastered ere she was grown up. Then
she fell upon romance, and Charlemagne and his Paladins, the heroes of
Troy, Alexander and his generals, peopled her imagination. She had heard,
too, of the great necromancer Virgilius (for into such the middle age
transformed the poet), and, her fancy already excited by her Lapp nurse's
occult science, she began eagerly to court forbidden lore.
Forbidden, indeed, magic was by the Church in public; but as a reality,
not as an imposture. Those whose consciences were tough and their faith
weak, had little scruple in applying to a witch, and asking help from the
powers below, when the saints above were slack to hear them.
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