One of the most incredible instances of this extremely silly and surprisingly persistent superstition occurred in 1871 at Biskunizy, a village of Prussian Posen, where a laborer, named Bekker, had by industry and frugality gradually acquired a competence and been able to buy a house of his own, in which he led a happy domestic life with his wife and five children, of whom he was very fond. After fourteen years of unbroken felicity the wife's elder sister, Marianne Chernyak, came from Poland to pay them a visit. This woman was a crackbrained devotee, who spent half her time in going to mass and the other half in backbiting her neighbors. She also claimed that she could detect at once whether a person is in league with Satan, and could cast out devils. The villagers came to look upon her as a witch, and avoided all association with her, especially as her aberrations manifested themselves in exceedingly malevolent and mischievous forms. Unfortunately, she acquired complete ascendency over her younger sister, who accepted her absurd pretensions as real. On November 19, 1871, Marianne, after returning from confession, went to bed, but at midnight Mrs. Bekker, who slept with her youngest child, a boy about a year old, was awakened by a fearful shriek and lit the lamp. Thereupon the sister rushed into the room, crying: "The demons have stolen your child and put a changeling in your bed: beat him, beat him, if you wish to have your child again!" Under the influence of this suggestion, which seemed to be almost hypnotic in its character, the bewildered mother began to beat the boy. The aunt now seized him and swung him to and fro, as if she would fling him out of the window, at the same time calling out to Satan: "There! you have him; take your brat!" She then gave him back to his mother with the words: "Throw him to the ground, drub him, beat him to death; otherwise you will never recover your child." This advice was followed, and the boy severely strapped with a heavy girdle as he lay on the floor. Meanwhile Bekker, hearing the noise, got up and at first tried to intervene for the protection of his son, but was easily convinced by his wife that she was doing the right thing, and persuaded to aid her in discomfiting the devil by beating the boy with a juniper stick. The process of exorcism, thus renewed with increased vigor, soon proved fatal. At this juncture, as the son of the aunt, a lad of five years, threw himself down with loud lamentations beside the dead body of his little cousin, his mother cried out: "Beat him; he is not my child! Why should we spare him? We shall get other children!" Thereupon he, too, was maltreated in the same manner until he expired. The aunt then declared that the devil had crept into the stovepipe, and went to work to demolish the stove, but, when she was prevented from doing so, fled into the garden, where she was found the next morning by the school-teacher. By this time Bekker and his wife seem to have come to their senses, and were sitting by the corpses of the murdered children, weeping and praying, as the neighbors entered the house. The trial, which took place at Ostrov in January, 1872, led to the introduction of conflicting expert testimony concerning the mental soundness of the accused, and the matter was finally referred to a commission of psychiaters in Berlin, who decided that Bekker and his wife were not suffering from mental disease, and therefore not irresponsible, but that the aunt was subject to periodical insanity to such a degree as not to be accountable for her actions. Curiously enough, the jurors remained uninfluenced by this testimony, and pronounced her guilty of the crime laid to her charge, and in accordance with this verdict the court sentenced her to three years' imprisonment with hard labor. The jurors even went so far as to declare that she herself did not believe in the existence of elf children or satanic changelings, but made use of this popular superstition for her own selfish purposes, and that she guilefully denounced her own boy as an imp in order to get rid of him. In this verdict, or rather in the considerations urged in support of it, it is easy to perceive the effects of strong local prejudice against the accused, who had the reputation of being a lazy, malicious, and crafty person, and was therefore denied the extenuation of honest self-deception. Indeed, in such cases it is always more or less difficult to determine where sincere delusion ceases and conscious swindling begins.