he Grammar
School. Then they all prayed, and a Voice came from under the bed:
"Would you know the Witches of Glenluce?" The Voice named a few,
including one long dead. But the Minister, with rare good sense,
remarked that what Satan said was not evidence.

Let it be remarked that "the lad Tom" had that very day "come back with
the Minister." The Fiend then offered terms. "Give me a spade and
shovel, and depart from the house for seven days, and I will make a
grave, and lie down in it, and trouble you no more." Hereon Campbell,
with Scottish caution, declined to give the Devil the value of a straw.
The visitors then hunted after the voice, observing that some of the
children were in bed. They found nothing, and then, as the novelists
say, "a strange thing happened."

There appeared a naked hand and an arm, from the elbow down, beating upon
the floor till the house did shake again. "The Fiend next exclaimed that
if the candle were put out he would appear in the shape of Fireballs."

Let it be observed that now, for the first time, we learn that all the
scene occurred in candle-light. The appearance of floating balls of fire
is frequent (if we may believe the current reports) at spiritualistic
seances. But what a strange, ill-digested tale is Mr. Sinclair's! He
lets slip an expression which shows that the investigators were in one
room, the But, while the Fiend was diverting himself in the other room,
the Ben! The Fiend (nobody going Ben) next chaffed a gentleman who wore
a fashionable broad-brimmed hat, "whereupon he presently imagined that he
felt a pair of shears going about his hat," but there was no such matter.
The voice asked for a piece of bread, which the others were eating, and
said the maid gave him a crust in the morning. This she denied, but
admitted that something had "clicked" a piece of bread out of her hand.

The seance ended, the Devil slapping a safe portion of the children's
bodies, with a sound resembling applause. After many months of this
really annoying conduct, poor Campbell laid his case before the
Presbyters, in 1655, thirty years before the date of publication. So a
"solemn humiliation" was actually held all through the bounds of the
synod. But to little purpose did Glenluce sit in sackcloth and ashes.
The good wife's plate was snatched away before her very eyes, and then
thrown back at her. In similar "stirs," described by a Catholic
missionary in Peru soon after Pizarro's c