d beat them, and at once, instead of the black greyhound,
"one Dickonson's wife" stood up, and instead of the brown greyhound "a
little boy whom this informer knoweth not." He started to run away, but
the woman stayed him and offered him a piece of silver "much like to a
faire shillinge" if he would not betray her. The conscientious boy
answered "Nay, thou art a witch," "whereupon shee put her hand into her
pocket againe and pulled out a stringe like unto a bridle that gingled,
which shee put upon the litle boyes heade that stood up in the browne
greyhounds steade, whereupon the said boy stood up a white horse." In
true Arabian Nights fashion they mounted and rode away. They came to a
new house called Hoarstones, where there were three score or more
people, and horses of several colors, and a fire with meat roasting.
They had flesh and bread upon a trencher and they drank from glasses.
After the first taste the boy "refused and would have noe more, and said
it was nought." There were other refreshments at the feast. The boy was,
as he afterwards confessed, familiar with the story of the feast at
Malking Tower.[6]

The names of those present he did not volunteer at first; but, on being
questioned, he named eighteen[7] whom he had seen. The boy confessed
that he had been clever enough to make most of his list from those who
were already suspected by their neighbors.

It needed but a match to set off the flame of witch-hatred in
Lancashire. The boy's story was quite sufficient. Whether his narrative
was a spontaneous invention of his own, concocted in emergency, as he
asserted in his confession at London, or whether it was a carefully
constructed lie taught him by his father in order to revenge himself
upon some hated neighbors, and perhaps to exact blackmail, as some of
the accused later charged, we shall never know. In later life the boy is
said to have admitted that he had been set on by his father,[8] but the
narrative possesses certain earmarks of a story struck out by a child's
imagination.[9] It is easy enough to reconcile the two theories by
supposing that the boy started the story of his own initiative and that
his father was too shrewd not to realize the opportunity to make a
sensation and perhaps some money. He took the boy before justices of the
peace, who, with the zeal their predecessors had displayed twenty-two
years before, made many arrests.[10] The boy was exhibited from town to
town in Lancashire as a g