hey produce is to send them to sleep, disturb their
imagination, and make them believe they are going long journeys, while
they remain profoundly sleeping in their beds.

The fathers of the council of Paris, of the year 829, confess that
magicians, wizards, and people of that kind, are the ministers and
instruments of the demon in the exercise of their diabolical art; that
they trouble the minds of certain persons by beverages calculated to
inspire impure love; that they are persuaded they can disturb the sky,
excite tempests, send hail, predict the future, ruin and destroy the
fruit, and take away the milk of cattle belonging to one person, in
order to give it to cattle the property of another.

The bishops conclude that all the rigor of the laws enacted by princes
against such persons ought to be put in force against them, and so
much the more justly, that it is evident they yield themselves up to
the service of the devil.

Spranger, in the _Malleus Maleficorum_, relates, that in Suabia, a
peasant who was walking in his fields with his little girl, a child
about eight years of age, complained of the drought, saying, "Alas!
when will God give us some rain?" Immediately the little girl told him
that she could bring him some down whenever he wished it. He
answered,--"And who has taught you that secret?" "My mother," said
she, "who has strictly forbidden me to tell any body of it."

"And what did she do to give you this power?"

"She took me to a master, who comes to me as many times as I call
him."

"And have you seen this master?"

"Yes," said she, "I have often seen men come to my mother's house; she
has devoted me to one of them."

After this dialogue, the father asked her how she could do to make it
rain upon his field only. She asked but for a little water; he led her
to a neighboring brook, and the girl having called the water in the
name of him to whom she had been devoted by her mother, they beheld
directly abundance of rain falling on the peasant's field.

The father, convinced that his wife was a sorceress, accused her
before the judges, who condemned her to be burnt. The daughter was
baptized and vowed to God, but she then lost the power of making it
rain at her will.

Footnotes:

[216] Alphons. a Castro ex Petro Grilland. Tract. de Haeresib.

[217] Bolland, 5 Jul. p. 287.

CHAPTER XX.

STORY OF LOUIS GAUFREDI AND MAGDALEN DE LA PALUD, OWNED BY THEMSELVES
TO BE A SORCERER AND SORCERE