est-chamber of an inn, and who
offered his services to them in the monastery. They gave him a corner
in the kitchen. The serving-boy used to torment him by throwing dirty
water over him. After unavailing protests, the spirit hung the boy up
to a beam, but let him down again before serious harm resulted. Luther
states that this "brownie" was well known by sight in the neighbouring
town (the name of which he does not give). But by far the larger
number of his stories, which, be it observed, are warranted as
ordinary occurrences, as to the possibility of which there was no
question, are coloured by that more sinister side of supernaturalism
so much emphasised by the new theology.

The mediaeval devil was, for the most part, himself little more than a
prankish Ruebezahl, or Robin Goodfellow; the new Satan of the
Reformers was, in very deed, an arch-fiend, the enemy of the human
race, with whom no truce or parley might be held. The old folklore
belief in _incubi_ and _succubi_ as the parents of changelings is
brought into connection with the theory of direct diabolic begettal.
Thus Luther relates how Friedrich, the Elector of Saxony, told him of
a noble family that had sprung from a _succubus_: "Just," says he, "as
the Melusina at Luxembourg was also such a _succubus_, or devil." In
the case referred to, the _succubus_ assumed the shape of the man's
dead wife, and lived with him and bore him children, until, one day,
he swore at her, when she vanished, leaving only her clothes behind.
After giving it as his opinion that all such beings and their
offspring are wiles of the devil, he proceeds: "It is truly a grievous
thing that the devil can so plague men that he begetteth children in
their likeness. It is even so with the nixies in the water, that lure
a man therein, in the shape of wife or maid, with whom he doth dally
and begetteth offspring of them." The change whereby the beings of the
old naive folklore are transformed into the devil or his agents is
significant of that darker side of the new theology, which was
destined to issue in those horrors of the witchcraft-mania that
reached their height at the beginning of the following century.

One more story of a "changeling" before we leave the subject. Luther
gives us the following as having come to his knowledge near
Halberstadt, in Saxony. A peasant had a baby, who sucked out its
mother and five nurses, besides eating a great deal. Concluding that
it was a changeling, t