ly. Their new baptism was a baptism of blood: for their
lord cut their fingers and wrote their names in blood in his
book. After other ceremonies they sit down to a table, and are
regaled with not the choicest viands (for such an occasion and
from such a host)--broth, bacon, cheese, oatmeal. Dancing and
fighting (the latter a peculiarity of the Northern Sabbath) ensue
alternately. They indulge, too, in the debauchery of the South:
the witches having offspring from their intercourse with the
demons, who intermarry and produce a mongrel breed of toads and
serpents. As interludes, it may be supposed, to the serious part
of the entertainment the fiend would contrive various jokes,
affecting to be dead; and, a graver joke, he would bid them to
erect a huge building of stone, in which they were to be saved
upon the approaching day of judgment. While engaged at this work
he threw down the unfinished house about their ears, to the
consternation, and sometimes injury, of his vassals.[155] Some of
the witnesses spoke of a great dragon encircled with flames, and
an iron chair; of a vision of a burning pit. The minister of the
district gave his evidence that, having been suffering from a
painful headache, he could account for the unusual severity of
the attack only by supposing that the witches had celebrated one
of their infernal dances upon his head while asleep in bed: and
one of them, in accordance with this conjecture, acknowledged
that the devil had sent her with a sledge-hammer to drive a nail
into the temples of the obnoxious clergyman. The solidity of his
skull saved him; and the only result was, as stated, a severe
pain in his head.

[155] Le Sage's _Diable Boiteux_, who so obligingly
introduces the Spanish student to the secret realities of
human life, is, it may be observed, of both a more rational
and more instructive temperament than the ordinary demons
who appear at the witches' revels to practise their
senseless and fantastic rites.

All the persuasive arguments of the examiners could not induce
the witches to repeat before them their well-known tricks:
because, as they affirmed, 'since they had confessed all they
found all their witchcraft was gone: and the devil at this time
appeared very terrible with claws on his hands and feet, with
horns on his head and a long tail behind, and showed them a pit
burning with a hand out; but the devil did thrust the person down
again with an iron fork, and sugge