ravagances; and imputed
it as a fresh crime to the Duke of York that, though he could not be
often accused of toleration, he considered the discipline of the house
of correction as more likely to bring the unfortunate Gibbites to their
senses than the more dignified severities of a public trial and the
gallows. The Cameronians, however, did their best to correct this
scandalous lenity. As Meikle John Gibb, who was their comrade in
captivity, used to disturb their worship in jail by his maniac howling,
two of them took turn about to hold him down by force, and silence him
by a napkin thrust into his mouth. This mode of quieting the unlucky
heretic, though sufficiently emphatic, being deemed ineffectual or
inconvenient, George Jackson, a Cameronian, who afterwards suffered at
the gallows, dashed the maniac with his feet and hands against the wall,
and beat him so severely that the rest were afraid that he had killed
him outright. After which specimen of fraternal chastisement, the
lunatic, to avoid the repetition of the discipline, whenever the
prisoners began worship, ran behind the door, and there, with his own
napkin crammed into his mouth, sat howling like a chastised cur. But on
being finally transported to America, John Gibb, we are assured, was
much admired by the heathen for his familiar converse with the devil
bodily, and offering sacrifices to him. "He died there," says Walker,
"about the year 1720."[7] We must necessarily infer that the pretensions
of the natives to supernatural communication could not be of a high
class, since we find them honouring this poor madman as their superior;
and, in general, that the magic, or powahing, of the North American
Indians was not of a nature to be much apprehended by the British
colonists, since the natives themselves gave honour and precedence to
those Europeans who came among them with the character of possessing
intercourse with the spirits whom they themselves professed to worship.

[Footnote 7: See Patrick Walker's "Biographia Presbyteriana," vol. ii.
p. 23; also "God's Judgment upon Persecutors," and Wodrow's "History,"
upon the article John Gibb.]

Notwithstanding this inferiority on the part of the powahs, it occurred
to the settlers that the heathen Indians and Roman Catholic Frenchmen
were particularly favoured by the demons, who sometimes adopted their
appearance, and showed themselves in their likeness, to the great
annoyance of the colonists. Thus, in the yea