to sit down, except
for half an hour, at prayers, 'then all was quiet'. She remarked,
with stoicism, 'these things could not be helped'. Fowler came in
at ten, but fled in a fright at one in the morning. By five, Mrs.
Golding summoned Mrs. Pain, who had gone to bed, 'all the tables,
chairs, drawers, etc., were tumbling about'.

They rushed across to Fowler's where, as soon as Ann arrived, the
old game went on. Fowler, therefore, like the landlord in the poem,
'did plainly say as how he wished they'd go away,' at the same time
asking Mrs. Golding 'whether or not, she had been guilty of some
atrocious crime, for which providence was determined to pursue her
on this side the grave,' and to break crockery till death put an end
to the stupendous Nemesis. 'Having hitherto been esteemed a most
deserving person,' Mrs. Golding replied, with some natural warmth,
that 'her conscience was quite clear, and she could as well wait the
will of providence in her own house as in any other place,' she and
the maid went to her abode, and there everything that had previously
escaped was broken. 'A nine-gallon cask of beer that was in the
cellar, the door being open and nobody near it, turned upside down';
'a pail of water boiled like a pot'. So Mrs. Golding discharged
Miss Ann Robinson and that is all.

At Mrs. Golding's they took up three, and at Mrs. Pain's two pails
of the fragments that were left. The signatures follow, appended on
January 11.

The tale has a sequel. In 1817 an old Mr. Braidley, who loved his
joke, told Hone that he knew Ann, and that she confessed to having
done the tricks by aid of horse-hairs, wires and other simple
appliances. We have not Mr. Braidley's attested statement, but
Ann's character as a Medium is under a cloud. Have all other
Mediums secret wires? (Every-day Book, i. 62.)

Ann Robinson, we have seen, was a tranquil and philosophical maiden.
Not so was another person who was equally active, ninety years
earlier.

Bovet, in his Pandaemonium (1684), gives an account of the Demon of
Spraiton, in 1682. His authorities were 'J. G., Esquire,' a near
neighbour to the place, the Rector of Barnstaple, and other
witnesses. The 'medium' was a young servant man, appropriately
named Francis Fey, and employed in the household of Sir Philip
Furze. Now, this young man was subject to 'a kind of trance, or
extatick fit,' and 'part of his body was, occasionally, somewhat
benumbed and seemingly deader t