d traversed me to and fro, for several hours. I cannot tell you what
passed within me during that time, and how that spirit united itself with
mine, leaving no liberty either of sensation or of thought, but acting in
me like another self, or as if I possessed two souls; these two souls
making, as it were, a battle ground of my body. When I sought, at the
instigation of the one, to make the sign of the cross on my mouth, the
other suddenly would turn round my hand and seize the fingers with my
teeth, making me bite myself with rage. When I sought to speak, the word
would be taken out of my mouth; at mass I would be stopped short; at table
I could not carry the food to my mouth; at confession I forgot my sins; in
fine, I felt the devil go and come within me as if he used me for his
daily dwelling-house."

Or, if instead of passing into a single operator, as in the case of Surin,
the diseased contagion should suddenly expand itself among a crowd of
bystanders, there would be nothing to wonder at, although enough to
deplore, in such a catastrophe. It would be no more than has already
happened in all the epidemics of lycanthropy and witchmania, of the
dancers of St. Vitas, of the Jumpers, Quakers, and Revivalists, of the
Mewers, Barkers, and Convulsionnaires. The absence of religious
pretensions among the operators seems as yet to be the chief guarantee
against such results. If instead of being made rigid and lucid by the
manipulations of a professor, the patients should find themselves cast
into that state by contact with the tomb of a preacher, or with the
reliques of a saint, society would soon be revisited with all the evils of
_pseudo_-miracles and supposed demoniacal possessions. The comparatively
innocent frenzy of the followers of Father Mathew, was the nearest
approach to a social disturbance of that kind that our country has been
visited by since the barking epidemic of the fourteenth century. "In the
county of Leicester, a person travelling along the road," says Camden,
"found a pair of gloves, fit for his hands, as he thought; but when he put
them on, he lost his speech immediately, and could do nothing but bark
like a dog; nay, from that moment, the men and women, old and young,
throughout the whole country, barked like dogs, and the children like
whelps. This plague continued, with some eighteen days, with others a
month, and with some for two years; and, like a contagious distemper, at
last infected the neighbo