A MIRROR FOR WITCHES

in which is reflected the Life, Machinations,
and Death of Famous DOLL BILBY, who,
with a more than feminine perversity, preferred
a Demon to a Mortal Lover. Here is
also told how and why a Righteous and Most
Awful JUDGEMENT befell her, destroying
both Corporeal Body and Immortal Soul.

By
ESTHER FORBES

With woodcuts by
ROBERT GIBBINGS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

TO
MARY AND GERHART JENTSCH

A MIRROR FOR WITCHES

CHAPTER I

1

Certain Examples to Show Doll Bilby not alone among Women in her preference for Evil. The Cases of Ry, Goose, Leda, Danaë, etc., cited.

It has long been known that, on occasions, devils in the shape of humanity or in their own shapes (that is, with horns, hoofs, and tails) may fancy mortal women. By dark arts, sly promises of power, flattery, etc., they may prevail even upon Christian women, always to the destruction of these women’s souls and often to that of their bodies.

For in Northumberland, Meslie Ry was burned in 1616 because she had taken a fiend to love.

A few years later, Christie Goose, a single woman upwards of forty years, suddenly flew lunatic—and that upon the Lord’s Day. Then she did confess that each night and every night the Devil, wickedly assuming the shape of Mr. Oates, God’s minister at Crumplehorn, Oxon., came to her through her window. This fact amazed Crumplehorn, for Goose was of all women most pious, and had sat for years in humble prayerfulness at the feet of Mr. Oates. Some were astonished that even a devil should find need for this same Goose, who was of hideous aspect.

There was a young jade, servant in an alderman’s house in London, who, although she confessed nothing and remained obdurate to the end, was hanged and then burned because she bore a creature with horns on its head and a six-inch tail behind. Such a creature the just magistrates determined no mortal man might beget, although the saucy wench suggested that an alderman might. Moreover, certain children in the neighbourhood testified that they had twice or thrice seen ‘a burly big black man’ sitting on the ridgepole.

Some assume that as the gods of antiquity were in no way gods (being seekers after evil—not after light), they should therefore be considered caco-demons or devils. The Reverend Pyam Plover, of Boston, has written learnedly on this subject, saying, in part, ‘For is it not possible that the Lord God of Israel, being those days but the God of Israel, may have permitted certain of his Fallen Angels to stray from the vitals of Hell and disport themselves through Greece and ancient Italy? Here they revealed themselves ... in many ways to heathen people, who falsely worshipped them as gods. If this be true Zeus might better assume his true name of Satan, and let us call Apollo but Apollyon and recognize in Mars, Hermes, etc., Beelzebub and Belial. Then may the female “divinities” be true descendants of Lilith.’ So one may learn from antiquity (consider Leda, Io, Danaë, and others) how great is the ardour felt by devils for mortal women.

As is not yet forgotten, in 1662, near threescore years ago, a woman called Greensmith, living at Hartford in New England, confessed the Devil had carnal knowledge of her. For this she was hanged.

More strangely yet, lived, for brief space of years, famous Doll Bilby, best known as ‘Bilby’s Doll’. She flourished at Cowan Corners, close by the town of Salem, but an afternoon’s journey from my own parish of Sudbury. Of other women devil-ridden, be it Leda or Ry, Greensmith or Danaë, Christie Goose or La Voisin, little can be said, for but little is known. All were witches (if we accept as witches such women as traffic with fiends), but little else is known. Yet of Bilby’s famous Doll, in the end all things were known. From old wives’ tales, court records, and the diaries of certain men, from the sworn affidavits and depositions of others, from the demonologies of Mr. Cotton Mather, and the cipher journal of Mr. Zacharias Zelley, we may know with a nicety what this woman was and how she lived, from whence she came, how she grew to witchcraft, how she felt, thought, and at the last how she died.

2

Mr. Bilby sails far to seek out TROUBLE, and, having found Trouble, nurtures it.

She was born of a wicked witch-woman and begotten by one who was no better, that is, by a warlock. These two devil-worshippers and, they say, two hundred more were burned in one great holocaust at Mont Hoël in Brittany. Black smoke, screams of death, stench of flesh settled down over town and harbour, causing sickness and even vomiting.

On that same day, by evil fortune, a brig manned by Dawlish men stood in the Bouche de Saint-Hoël. These men, seeing that it was fête day, and curious because of the smoke, the screams, and the stench, went to the holocaust. There they saw a wild child, more animal or goblin than human being. This wild child would have followed her mother, who burned in the heart of the fire, if soldiers had not pushed her back. A priest bade the soldiers let her pass to death, for, being of witch-people, she would undoubtedly burn sooner or later. The Englishmen protested, and Mr. Jared Bilby, captain and owner of the brig, caught and held the wild child, who did not struggle against him as she had against the soldiers. Instead she held fast to him, for even the wicked may recognize goodness. The priest showed his yellow fangs at the Dawlish men. He hated and scorned them. ‘Take the child and be gone. She was born of a witch-woman and will grow to witchcraft and do much harm—but in England among the heretics. Be gone.’

The child clung to Mr. Bilby and he to her. He took her in his arms, and she lay corpse-pale and glass-eyed like one about to die. This men remembered. When he put her down upon the deck of the brig, he was badly sweated as though his burden had been more than he, a strong young man, might bear. He told his men the child weighed as though a child of stone. Some thought that his heart mistook him, and that he already regretted the acceptance of so dangerous a gift.

Gathering his men about him and having prayed, he gave thanks to Jehovah, Who, although He had never given him a child of his own body, yet had seen fit to send this poor little one to him. Then he bade his men keep their tongues behind their teeth, telling no one from whence was this child (which in the future should be his child), nor the manner of her parents’ death, nor the harm which the priest swore she should live to perform. This promise his men kept for years, but in the end, when they were old men, they preferred to serve Gossip and Scandal rather than a kind master, long, long dead.

For days the child lay like death, only occasionally jumping madly from her pallet, screaming ‘Le feu! Le feu! Le feu!’ then falling back, covering her face with her hands and laughing horribly. The captain coaxed and petted her, urged her to eat, and quieted her with his hands. So by love he restored her to humanity.

Because of her small size he called her ‘Doll,’ which name she well lived up to, never acquiring the height and weight of other women. No one ever knew her real age. She may have been seven or perhaps six when she first came to England. Being unable to talk English and at first unable to serve herself, she may have seemed younger than she was. Yet, on the other hand, Fear, Grief, and Sickness often make their Hosts appear older than the fact.

Mr. Bilby believed that the shock of her parents’ death (for they were burned before her eyes, her mother crying out to her most piteously from the midst of flame) had broken the reins of memory. He thought she had forgotten everything that lay back of her reawakening to life on board his brig, which was called God’s Mercy. Also he comforted himself with the belief that if—as might be—she had learned any little tricks of witchery, or if she had ever been taken to Sabbat or Black Mass, or if she had looked upon the Prince of Hell, or even if (being led on by her parents) she had sworn to serve him, she would have forgotten all these things. She was born again and this time of God and to God, whom Mr. Bilby piously swore she should serve—Him and Him alone. The child had been so vehemently frightened she had forgotten all good and needful things, how to dress herself, how to eat with knife and spoon. She had forgotten the language of her birth.

But of evil she remembered everything.

3

He brings the Foundling to his own hearth and to the bosom of his Goodwife. There the goblin-child rewards Kindness and Mercy with Malediction and Evil. She overlooks the Goodwife.

Hannah, wife of Jared Bilby, would not accept her sterility with Christian fortitude. She railed against the wisdom of God, saying, ‘Mrs. Such-and-Such is but half so big and fine a woman as I, yet she has three sons. Goody This-and-That, the jade, can find but little favour in the eyes of her Maker, yet, to her He sends more children than she can feed; but I, a pious, godly, praying woman, remain barren.’ Which, she wickedly averred, showed the injustice of Divinity. However, by curious chance or mischance, soon after Mr. Bilby set out with his men and brig for the coasts of France and Spain, she found herself with child. Some say the Lord tired of her railing, and, to punish her, first raised up her hopes and then sent Doll to blight them for her.

Summer wore away. The nights grew chill. She was four months with child. Then Mr. Bilby, late one evening, came to Dawlish harbour. With him was his goblin-child, now grown pretty and playful. He arrived home in the black of the night and through pelting rain. The child he carried wrapped in his greatcoat to protect her from the cruel storm. He shook the shutter which he knew was by his wife’s bedboard.

‘Woman, woman, get up and open to me.’

The woman lay for warmth with her servant wench, Susan Croker. The fury of the night shewed forth the grandeur of God. The wind howled above the beating of the rain. Croker cried to her mistress not to open the door on such a night. It could be no living man who knocked, for it is on such vexed and angry nights as these the sea gives up its dead.

Hannah was a fearless woman. She got quickly to the door, unbarred it, and, in a deluge of wind and wet, Mr. Bilby entered with his burden. Her heart mistook her. She cried out, ‘Jared, what have you there in that great bundle?’ So he took it to the hearth and, as the women knelt, throwing kindling on the fire, he opened the bundle and out popped the goblin-child. She shuddered away from the fire (a thing she always feared) and clutched her foster father with her little hands, gazing into his face with round black eyes. Every thread of her spikey hair was tumbled up on end. The women cried in horror that this was no child. This was an imp, a monkey, a pug. But Jared Bilby on his knees protected the foundling, both from the fire and the women’s angry glances. He soothed her with his body and kind words, ‘Ah, the fire would never devour her.’ He was here, and he would never leave her. She was his child, etc. He would always love and cherish her—and the like. The child pushed her tously head under his chin and froze into stillness.

Susan Croker told many that, from the beginning, the child bewitched him. Nor did the affection which Bilby gave his Doll ever seem like the love which men feel to their children, but rather the darker and often unholy passion which is evoked by mature, or almost mature women—a passion which witches, when young and comely, have often engendered with ferocious intensity. As long as he lived he was forever stroking her shaggy black hair, looking lovingly into those button-round eyes, and kissing a wide hobgoblin mouth which many a Christian would fear to kiss. Hannah was a lusty, jealous woman who could not abide such mean rivalry as that of a foundling child. The woman, who had always been a gossiping wife, now, under the baleful influence of Doll, seemed like to become a shrew. She was steely set in her hatred of the child, although she fed her, gave her a corner to sleep in, and taught her some small prayers. With her the child seemed dull, indifferent, but with Mr. Bilby she was merry, playful, and loving. So the one thought her a knowing child and the other a zany.

Mr. Bilby would not tell his wife where he had found Doll, but it did trouble him that the woman so cunningly insisted that either she was the child of a witch or the begotten of the Devil. Even Susan Croker, who was kind to the foundling, had horrid suspicions of her. She could not teach Doll the noble, sonorous lines of Our Lord’s Prayer, although the imp was quick to learn worthless things, such as ‘This Little Pig Goes to Market’ or ‘A Cat Comes Fiddling Out of the Barn.’

The child, having been in the house a month, there occurred a chance to show what she could do—that is, what evil she could do.

4

Doll covets a ship for a toy and the whole of her Foster Father’s love. She nefariously gains her ends and slays a Dangerous Rival.

The midwife promised Hannah a great thumping boy handsome as his mother, strong as his father. He should either wear the bands of the clergy or walk the quarter-deck of the king’s navy. Because her husband favoured the nautical life for his unborn son, he made him a rattle in the shape of a ship. In the hull were seven balls which, when the ship was shaken, rattled. Now Doll was forever leaning against his knees and watching him as he carved out this bauble. As one after another of the seven balls were liberated in the heart of the wood, she would laugh and gloat. It was not a toy for her, but for him who should (according to nature) supplant her in her foster father’s love. In her evil heart she must have brooded on these things and come to hate this other child that would possess the ship and Bilby’s affection. Her hands were always outstretched to the rattle and she cried, ‘Give, give, give.’

One day as they were thus—man and child—Hannah came in from the milk-house. The woman was jealous—not only for her own sake, but for the sake of the unborn. ‘For,’ she thought, ‘what shall he, who gives all to a foundling, have left for his own son? Not only has this wicked girl turned him away from me, but she takes the rightful place of his own child.’ Then she said:

‘It is not well that a woman in my condition should be exposed to contrary and evil influences. Jared, send away your “pretty pet”; give her to the wife of your ship’s cook to keep—at least until I am delivered. Many wiser than I, yes, and wiser than you....’ Her jaw swung loose as though broke. Her teeth stuck out, her eyes bulged, for the goblin-child, through her mat of hair and out of her wild bright eyes, was staring at her. She stared and moved her lips in a whisper, then she skipped across the room, grinning in diabolical glee. Mrs. Hannah felt the curse go through her. The babe in her womb moved in its wretchedness, and was blasted. The woman felt its tiny soul flutter to her lips and escape. She knew that Doll (being of some infernal origin) could see this same soul, and she guessed, from the roving of her eyes, how it clung for a moment to its mother’s lips, how it flew to the Bible upon the stand (in which its name would never be recorded), how it poised upon the window-sill, then, unborn and frustrated, it departed to whatever Paradise or Hell God prepares for such half-formed souls. Hannah began to screech and wail, then fell back upon the bed in a swoon.

The body of the unborn child shrivelled within her, and, when a male midwife was called from Dawlish, he said she had been but full of air. She never was again with child. Some said (and Captain Bilby among them) that she never had been—even on the ’bove-related most famous occasion.

But if, as the most informed and thoughtful have said, the blasting of Hannah’s infant was indeed a fact, then we have to hand, and early in the life history of Doll Bilby, an actual case of witchcraft. And is it likely such monstrous power (blasting unborn life with a glance or at most a muttered curse) should be given to any one who had not already set her name to the Devil’s Book, and compacted herself to Hell?

5

The New Land holds greater promise than the Old. Mr. Bilby, Ux et filia say fare-you-well to England and take up residence close to Salem and not far from Boston, in the Bay Colony. They prosper. The child grows an evil pace.

In those days England offered little peace to men (like Captain Bilby) who would worship God in their own way, and in accordance with His own holy teachings and the dictates of their own hearts—not according to teachings of bishops or priests. So Mr. Bilby often yearned towards that newer land which lay far west beyond the Atlantic. In time he sold his brig, God’s Mercy, and his freehold. The agent of the Bay Colony, in his office at Maiden Lane, London, told him to get to Southampton with his wife, child, and gear. Within the month he should sail.

Mrs. Hannah protested that if the child went she would not. Then he would humour and praise her, so at last she went, although with much bad grace.

In the year 1663 the ship Elizabeth arrived, by the goodness of God, to the colony at Massachusetts Bay, and in her came an hundred souls. There were yeomen, farmers, braziers, wainers, pewterers, etc., indentured servants, apprentices, etc., and certain gentlemen scholars, etc. But in after years the most famous of all these people was Bilby’s Doll, and it is she who has made the name of the ship Elizabeth remembered. There was in the hold a cargo of close to an hundred Bibles, and to this beneficent influence many attributed the quick fair passage which the Elizabeth enjoyed. No one thought it possible that the button-eyed foster child of Mr. Bilby could be a weather breeder. In fact no one thought of the child except to wonder at the foolish fondness which her ‘father’ continually showed her. They thought of the Bibles below and thanked God for their sunny voyage. Rather should they have thought of the witch-child. For good things, such as fine weather, may spring from evil people.

Also on this ship came one Zacharias Zelley, an Oxford man and a widower. He was no longer young, nor was he an old man. In demeanour he was sad and thoughtful. After some shiftings he, too, like the Bilbys, came to settle at Cowan Corners, and there he preached the Word of God. But in time he fell from God, and of him more hereafter.

The new land prospered the Bilbys and they were well content. The plantation which Mr. Bilby was able to buy was not only of admirable size, well-set-up with house, barns, sheds, etc., but it was already reduced to good order and its fertility was proved. Yet for many years, down to this present day, Bilby’s lands can produce little if anything except that coarse yellow broom which the vulgar call witches’ blood.

The cellar hole of this house still stands upon the skirts of Cowan Corners, and but six miles removed from Salem. In those days there was a good road before this house leading from Salem to Newburyport. Beyond this road were salt meadows and the sea. To the north of the house lay fields of maize, English grass, corn, peelcorn, barley, oats, pumpkins, ending only at the waters of the River Inch (as it was called in those days). To the south were the adjoining lands of Deacon Thumb. But to the west, beyond the rough pastures, and too close for a wholesome peace of mind, was a forest of a size and terror such as no Englishman could conceive of unless he should actually see it. It stretched without break farther than man could imagine, and the trees of it were greater than the masts of an admiral or the piers of a cathedral. Yet was it always a green and gloomy night in this forest, and over all was silence, unbreakable.

Many thought the tawny savages who lived within were veritable devils, and that, somewhere within this vastness, Satan himself might be found. To this Mr. Zacharias Zelley, having taken up the ministry at Cowan Corners, would not listen. ‘For,’ he said, ‘we left the Devil behind us in England. Seek God in the heart of this majestic and awful forest—not the Devil. When I was a boy in Shropshire I knew the very niche in the rocks where old women said the Devil lived and had his kitchen. It was there he kept his wife. Every holiday I hid close by the rocks, hoping to see his children.... Let us leave him there in the Old England, but in the New keep our eyes pure and open against the coming of the Lord.’

Atheism as the good and learned Glanvill, in his ‘Sadducismus Triumphatus,’ has proved, is begun in Sadducism and those that dare not bluntly say ‘there is no God’ (for a fair step and introduction) content themselves to deny there are spirits or witches or devils. Yet how sad to see one of the clergy first agree that the Devil could be left behind in England and soon claim there is no Devil, no witches, no spirits. For without these awful presences, who may be sure of God?

CHAPTER II

1

There is a small smell of WITCHCRAFT in and about Boston. A straw doll taken to Meeting throws many into confusion.

In the fall of 1665 two were hanged in Boston for the bedevilment of an elderly woman, her cousin Germain, and her swine.

In that same year Mr. Saul Peterham, a godly, decent man, refused some small rotten apples to an ancient and malicious hag. For this the old crone muttered at him, making an evil sign by her thumb and her nose, and took herself off in great bad humour. Mr. Peterham, on returning to his house, found that his wife—an estimable church woman—had fallen from a ladder she had put to the loft for the purpose of observing the conduct of her servant wench and the indentured male servant, the exact moment the crone had made her evil sign. The elders of the Church had at the old woman and forced her, weeping and on her knees, to forswear the Devil, his imps, and his ways, and to continue more strictly in the ways of God. It being observed that she could both weep and say the Lord’s Prayer, many believed the accusation of witchcraft to be a false one, such as is often launched against disagreeable and impotent old women.

By spring there was yet another suspicion of witchcraft in the Bay Colony, and this at Cowan Corners. In a hut close by the seashore, and in great misery, lived an old pauper called Greene and his wife. He was a tinker, but there were better tinkers than he, and he got little work to do. His wife was a proud woman, born in Kent of high rank, yet, by turn of fortune, she was so reduced as to have become the wife of a tinker. Her craft in herbs got her some money and more ill fame, nor was she content to raise and sell the honest herbs of England, but she must continually associate herself with the heathen tawny savages and thus learn arts—doubtless often evil arts—from them. The Indians venerated her, calling her ‘White Mother’ and Moon Woman.’ She went even into the great forest with more safety than any man. She was loving towards these peoples and had much traffic with them, in spite of the fact the Church elders had warned her twice, saying it is better for a woman to keep her own house than to go abroad through the woods alone and no one knew on what errand.

One Sabbath in the midst of the House of the Lord a poppet contrived of straw and maize, with a leather head and a grinning face on it, fell from below her skirts. None at the moment questioned her boldly as to what purpose she contrived this poppet, yet all thought of those dollies witches make but to destroy again, that their enemies may dwindle with the dwindling dolly.

Later in the week three deacons called upon her and demanded explanation. She was distrait, cried out upon them in anger because of their suspicions, and said she had but made a toy for Bilby’s poor little Doll, who, she said, was beaten and cruelly used by that shrew Hannah. The incident was then dismissed except for a public reprimand for a woman so depraved as to put into the hand of a child a toy upon the Lord’s Day and in the Lord’s House. After this the Greenes lost what friends they had, and no one came commonly to their hut upon the salt marsh but Bilby’s wicked Doll.

On a February night Hannah Bilby woke overcome with retching and vomiting. In the morning Mr. Kleaver, the surgeon, being called, took away two ounces of blood from the forearm; still she continued in wretched state three days. By the oppression on her chest and especially because of certain night sweatings and terrors, she became convinced she was bewitched and frankly accused Goodwife Greene. Mr. Zelley roughly bade her hold her tongue (this being but one of many times when he befriended a witch) and declared there was no reason why Greene should wish her harm. At which statement many were amazed, for they thought every one knew that Greene loved little Doll and hated the foster mother because of her cruelty. Through all the clustering villages—Salem, Ipswich, Cowan Corners, etc.—it was whispered how Doll had surrendered to Greene either parings from Mrs. Hannah’s nails or hair from her body, and had thus given Greene the wherewithal to work magic.

Within a year all suspicion seemed to have passed away from Goody Greene, but in a hundred ways more doubts gathered about the child and she was whispered of. Mrs. Bilby told many, here one and there two, usually with entreaties for prayers and commands for secrecy, that the girl was born and bred a witch. She told how her own unborn son (that thumping boy) had been blasted. She told them to watch—was not Mr. Bilby himself bewitched by her? So it seemed to many. There were no clothes fine enough in Boston for his dear Doll—he needs must send to England for them. Sometimes he held her on his knee—and she a girl of thirteen or fourteen. Even when the elders and the minister came to call on him, and Hannah, as befitted her gender, withdrew from the room, Bilby would keep his ridiculous hobgoblin squatting at his feet. As he talked, he patted her shaggy, spikey, hair.

The child had nothing to do with children of her own age, nor did godly parents wish their children to play with her. For the most part she was a silent thing, stealing about on feet as quiet as cats’ paws. To her foster father she was pretty and frolicsome. To Goodwife Greene she was loving, and stole from the Bilby larder food for the wretched paupers. With her mouth she said little to any one, but her eyes spoke—those round button eyes, and they spoke secret and evil things.

2

Monstrous facts regarding Doll’s earliest youth which Mr. Zelley repeated almost twenty years after her death. How she attended Black Sabbath, etc. How she saw the Devil in Brittany and probably swore to serve him, etc.

When the time came late in his life that Mr. Zelley, being old and broken, was accused of witchcraft, he told, after long questionings, much that he knew about Bilby’s Doll. For instance, he said she never forgot one of those wicked things which she had learned of her parents in Brittany.

It is true, the shock and horror of their death caused such mental anguish it seemed to her a black curtain (much like the smoke of the holocaust) dropped down upon her life. All that was actual in her life was before the curtain—that is, after her parents’ death; yet all that lay behind this curtain did exist for her—only infinitely small and infinitely far away. To see (for she did not call it remembering) what lay behind this barrier, she had to think and think only of blackness. Soon was her industry rewarded. Behold, the blackness disintegrated and little by little she saw strange scenes in piercing clarity, yet all in miniature. She saw these visions as though she were above them—say from the height of a church steeple, and she saw her own self, a little shaggy girl, walking below.

If no one disturbed her, if Mrs. Hannah did not cuff her for idleness, she could watch the movements of these people for hours. There were her father and mother, other witches and warlocks, phantom beasts, fiends, imps, goblins, fairies, and always her own self. Sometimes these people and creatures grew so small they were scarcely more than shifting sands. Yet the smaller they grew, the more intense was their actuality. Mr. Zelley said that she observed that when these images, visions, or what you will, were presented to her almost as large as life, they were vapoury and hard to see, but when they were no larger than a grain of sand she could see everything—the little frown on her father’s forehead, the scales on the imps’ shoulders, her mother’s teeth as she smiled, even the nails on the hands of her own self; yet how small must have been those hands when the whole body of an adult was no more than a grain of sand!

Mr. Zelley, an old and broken man, was commanded to tell further. What would she see—on what business would these folk be about? She would see naked men and women with goats’ horns on their heads. They danced back to back. As they danced, they cried ‘hu hu hura hu,’ in the manner of witch-people. She would see the sacrifice of a black kid, and the crucifixion of the sacred wafer. Did she ever see the Devil himself? Witch-people often select one of themselves to be, as it were, high priest in their infernal synagogue. Him they call devil. Such a one she often saw. He was young and lusty and dressed in green leaves. When they danced their sarabands, no one jumped as high as he. He was a pretty man and women loved him. It was only on Black Sabbath he had such power over men and women. At other times he was a cordwainer.

This devil that she saw was but a mock devil. Did she never see that Scriptural Devil—that Foul Fiend Lucifer? Ah, that she could never quite recall—not even with the powerful help of her strange minute images. It is true that after hours of application she would sometimes see a woman whom she knew to be her mother walking through great oak woods (mistletoe-infested) and with her, clinging to her skirts, was a child. The child was her own self. A great light pierced the green gloom of the forest and where it fell stood a man. He was an aristocrat, carried a small rapier with the hilt of which he toyed; he was dressed in green velvet, had a handsome, ruddy face, and loving blue eyes. Nor had he horns, she said, and if a tail, he kept it to himself; but his shoes she noticed were unsightly, as though contrived to accommodate clubbed foot or cloven hoof.

To him her mother knelt, and the child knelt also. The mother said she had a little servant for him, who she promised would obey him in all things. ‘What shall I do with so little a one?’ But he caressed her with his hands. His touch was cold as ice. Even to remember that touch raised the gooseflesh upon her. It was searing as the hands of Death. She never saw this particular scene enacted before her without experiencing a physical shock—pleasant and yet repellent. Then she could see the child accept the Book the man offered her, and she always made a mark in the Book with blood drawn from her own arm. But the end of this particular and much-loved vision was always the same and always disappointing, for she saw herself and her mother sitting by the hearth. Her mother was stirring the pot and as she stirred she talked, telling the story of a little girl who had walked with her mother in a great wood, had met the Devil, and had sworn to serve him. So it was Doll Bilby never could be sure whether or not she had actually promised to serve the Foul Fiend and had made her blood-mark in his Book, or whether it was but a tale told by her mother.

At first she felt no terror of the strange phantasies which, waking and sleeping, were always before her eyes, but as she grew to young womanhood, this uncertainty as to her true status came greatly to worry her. If she had indeed signed the Book of Hell, then was she utterly damned, and there was no hope for her. If she had not, then might she, by prayer, watchfulness, etc., escape into Paradise. Thus she endured great anguish of spirit. At last the Soul, which ever turns and struggles in the heart of man, turned uneasily within her and she tried to forget all the evil which she remembered—even the voice of her mother, crying out piteously to her from the midst of flame.

Then Conscience—that gift from God to man—raised its head, and she lay and moaned upon her bed, listening to the holy voice of Conscience, asking her over and over, to her utter weariness, what have you done—what have you done? So she applied herself with burning intensity to the ways of religion, and it was then, said Mr. Zelley, he first came to ponder upon her, although she told him nothing of herself or of her past until some years later. But all her pious exercises were performed without that pleasure which the good Christian habitually manifests, but rather with the terror of a lost soul. Mr. Zelley kept a diary, and in that diary he wrote (Doll being at that time in her sixteenth or even possibly in her seventeenth year) a wanton suggestion, ‘I mark with interest the religious fructuations of Miss D. B. but fear she fruits without roots, and but let a man, perhaps, Titus Thumb, come into her life by the door, and then shall God but pass out by the window ...’ and more light and blasphemous talk, suggesting slyly that there may be some resemblance between the carnal love of body and the spirit love of soul.

3

A good young man is taken in a witch’s net.

This Titus Thumb, to whom Mr. Zelley referred, was the oldest child and only son of Deacon Ephraim Thumb, whose lands lay south of and adjoining to the lands of Mr. Bilby. There had always been intimacy between the two farms, for the men of one helped the men of the other at harvesting, planting, and building. The two women were gossips. The two men were cronies. Titus had been much away because he was a scholar at the new college in Cambridge. For one year he was home again to help in the opening-up of certain new lands. He was a studious youth who hoped in time to prepare himself for the ministry of God. This, however, never came to pass, for God willed otherwise, and, on completing his studies at Cambridge, he remains there, known to hundreds of young Latinists as ‘Tutor Thumb.’

He was a young man of special parts and handsome person. He would be a minister and his father was rich. The wenches of the village flocked to him like moths to flame, ignoring often in the exuberance of the chase (for they were unmannerly and bold to him) proper female conduct. They mocked him among themselves, saying he was his mother’s darling or cosset; that he would never seek out a woman for himself. They would torment him, pulling him behind doors and kissing him, pushing their bodies against him when he could not escape them, etc., etc. For which wanton conduct they were well served, for he would have none of them, and, keeping the fifth commandment well in mind, stayed close to his parents’ house.

He had two younger sisters, born at one time, for they were twins. They were sad and puny children, and many who saw them wondered that God had seen fit to cut His cloth so close—that is, it seemed to many that He had but enough material (brains, bones, spirits, hair, vitals, etc.) to make one proper child, yet out of this little He had made two. In answer to this questioning of Divine Wisdom, Mr. Zelley said no one body could have endured as many diseases and ills as the Thumb twins were heir to. Perhaps it was as well to divide up the maladies as well as the strength. Labour had a falling sickness. She would stiffen with a horrid din, foam, and go into convulsions. Nor was Sorrow of much hardier stock. She was subject to nightmares and other delusions (which Mr. Kleaver insisted arose from a cold stomach). Their mother vexed herself greatly over them, and where another woman might think it well if the miserable things but made a good end and returned early to that God Who had sent them thus poorly fortified into the world, she was always calling upon Mr. Kleaver or Goody Greene to dose them, or Mr. Zelley to pray over them. They were pretty children with soft brown eyes and yellow hair, fine and finicky, but their limbs were miserably thin and their bellies somewhat swollen.

Mrs. Thumb told them not to play with Bilby’s Doll. She feared the girl because her foster mother said she was a witch. Like most sickly children, they were poorly trained in obedience. They met Bilby’s Doll, whenever they could, by the willow brook which separated the two farms. Of these meetings, however, they said little or nothing. The mother often heard them whispering and laughing to each other, and, because she would hear them talk of Mistress Dolly, she knew they saw her. As they were too feeble to be whipped or even shaken, she had little control over them.

She would have been vexed to know that often her husband, sitting at the Black Moon Tavern with Mr. Bilby, planned that in due time this same girl, whom Mrs. Thumb considered too dangerous even to cast an eye upon the twins, should marry the handsome Titus. On such occasions Mr. Bilby (although he would clap him on the back, and protest his friendship) always put him off—Doll was but a child, not old enough to marry. She had the immature body of a girl of twelve. Give her time and she would grow. Deacon Thumb would not be put off. Was she not sixteen at the youngest? Had not his own mother married before that?

He was most cupidous. He wanted his son to become heir to the fine estate of Bilby. He did not heed what his wife said of danger. He cared more that his son should have a great property in this world than that his soul should be saved for the next. He was not an evil man, for he was a deacon in the Church. He was a heedless man, and too easily dismissed as gossip the true stories his wife forever whispered in his ear, in regard to this same Doll.

Mrs. Bilby was anxious that the girl should marry and so be out of the house. One day she said, ‘What shall we ever do with your Doll? There’s not a man in the town that would marry her.’ Mr. Bilby said that every unmarried man in the town would be glad to get her. Mrs. Bilby said, ‘You mean they would be glad to get a slice off your meadows.’ He said he would box her ears for her. She said Doll would be lucky if she got herself a vagabond, or a widowed man, or an old man of eighty. Mr. Bilby boxed her ears and went down to the tavern. Then he told Deacon Thumb that, although it broke his heart even to think of parting with his treasure, yet was marriage the one and only proper state for woman, and he would put her happiness even before his own. Moreover, his wife still hated the girl, even more than she had the night she first saw her, and although a good woman (and very handsome), yet she was hard. He said he had just boxed her ears and suggested that he was now willing to talk of the marriage settlement. He would do something very handsome by Doll. ‘For God knows,’ he said, ‘she is dear to me.’

4

In spite of the Warnings of his Better Nature a young man looks covetously to Bilby’s Doll.

On certain days the men of the two farms combined their labours, then Doll brought to her foster father his midday dinner. To suit his fancy she would bring food for herself also. This food she would eat quickly and without speaking to any one, keeping close to Mr. Bilby. On those harvest days, when the sun was bright on the stubble and heat shimmered in the air, the shade beneath the oaks was grateful. Doll Bilby, in the bright dresses her foster father bought for her, looked as fresh within this shade as one of those little summer flowers that go down before the scythes of harvesters. This Titus noticed, and he knew, although never a word had been spoken to him, that his father wished the match and his mother opposed it.

Also he noticed that the young woman, although so small, was made in a neat and most pleasing manner. She was more dainty, more finicky in her cut than the big English girls. He often thought, as he stretched himself to rest upon the earth, that to the eye of a man of rare discernment such delicacy and small perfection might give more pleasure than more opulent charms, yet he never went so far as to say that he himself was that discerning man. Likewise it pleased him that she was shy before him, for he had been over-courted. When he would stretch his body along the ground close to where she sat, she would gaze unsmilingly at him out of her wild, troubled eyes, and something in that gaze—some necromancy—stirred his blood, so that at nights he felt desire for her, and often dreamed impossible things of her.

During all that year of harvest he had no thought for another one but only of Bilby’s wicked Doll. He knew the stories of her—for his mother was forever at his elbow whispering things. He knew of her foreign birth, how she had once blasted an unborn child, how she and Goody Greene had afflicted Mrs. Bilby some years ago, making her vomit pins and fur (for to such proportions had the story of the woman’s illness already grown), and he could see for himself how she bewitched her foster father out of his seven senses.

As he gazed upon her sometimes the marrow grew cold in his bones. He thought if he were a wise and Christian man, he would have none of her in spite of his own father’s cupidity. In his heart he, like his mother, feared her. He could not understand the power she, without effort, had over him, for the very sight of her coming across the hot fields of noon threw him into a cold, dismal, unnatural sweat. Now was his heart set towards this marriage, but he looked with dread as well as joy to that day which should unite her to him. He believed that whatever her secret might be she should deliver it up to him on her bridal. Half he was persuaded that he would find that she, like Sara in the Book of Tobit, had a demon lover, who would strangle any bridegroom, nor had he an angel or a fish’s liver, with which to protect himself.

5

A malignant black Bull leads all astray. Young Thumb fears Doll and suspects the creature is her Familiar.

The Thumbs had a young black bull, which, with other neat cattle and quick stock, they had out from England on the ship Fawnley. This bull was a wanderer, breaking stout fences, and seeking out his own pleasure among his neighbours’ corn fields, cabbage plots, and herds.

On the last day of April, Ahab, the bull, loosed himself, and climbing a high hedge of stumps, which looked strong enough to hold any creature but an angel from Heaven, he set forth. Having crossed many pastures and trampled down valuable rye, he came to the banks of the River Inch, where it formed the northern boundary of the Bilby farm. The men were far away burning brush. Mrs. Bilby was at her churn in the milk-house. Doll, a shiftless wench, was loitering by the river’s edge, and there she came across the bull. He was knee-deep among the cowslips. Seeing her, he threatened playfully with his short horns, and set off as fast as he could trot with a bunch of yellow flowers dangling from his blue lips.

She knew the animal to be of great value, and that she must quickly give warning of his liberty lest he escape into the forest, and, being set upon by savages or the feræ naturæ of the place, become but meat in the stomachs of those little schooled to appreciate his worth. She ran quickly back to the house, calling that Black Ahab was loose and she had seen him head for the forest. Mrs. Hannah, rushing from the milk-house, caught the girl by the arm, shook her angrily because the cows were up and ready for milking, and she was late to her work. She would not let her run to the upland fields where the men burned brush, nor to the Thumbs’ farm so that the creature might be caught. She flung her milking-stool and her pail at her feet, and told her to be about her own business, for if she had done as she should have done—that is, if she had made cheese all the afternoon, instead of loitering about the pastures—she never would have seen Ahab or known that he had escaped. Doll sat upon her stool and bent herself silently to her work.

On his return in the evening, Mr. Bilby was angry to find that no word had been sent to his neighbour in regard to the loss of his creature. Nor did Doll tell him that it was his wife’s and not her fault. Partly because she was ashamed that he thought her responsible for the loss, and partly because she was a wild girl who loved to run about, she joined the searching party, made up of the men of the two households.

They searched the pastures and the ploughed lands, the fields, the meadows. There was no place else to search but the forest, for Ahab was utterly gone. They searched the forest until it was black night, following the snappings of twigs, blowings, stampings. Not once did they see the body of the black bull. Doll kept to her foster father’s heels. Her dress and hands were torn. Her feet soaked with wet. She often called, and in a lovely voice, ‘Ahab ... Ahab.’ As often as she cried, Titus knew her whereabouts, and took himself to her side. For on that black night it was she and not the mischievous bull that he was pursuing. He thought how heavy was the night, how awful in their majesty the woods, and how wild and small the dark goblin-child. So he prayed at the same moment that God might deliver his soul from her soul, and her body unto his.

Weary and disheartened at last, all turned towards home. But Doll had lost Mr. Bilby, who had started back with Deacon Thumb. Titus, amazed and delighted to find her alone, walked by her side. Doll bitterly reproached herself that she had not given warning in time. To comfort her Titus said it was only his and his father’s fault because they could not keep the beast in bonds. To his amazement he found that it was not with their loss she was concerned, but only with the fortunes or misfortunes of the wretched bull. He thought, has this woman a familiar, and is it that accursed Ahab? So his marrow froze in his bones.

Thinking that she was indeed no bigger than one of those little goblins that live by the hob and bring good fortune to those who are kind to them, and also how there was much about her shape to please a man of rare discernment, he would have touched her with his hands (witch or no witch) and supported her weariness through the rough dark pasture lands. If she would accept this much from him, it was possible (for the night was May night when all young men for hundreds of years have been allowed special license from their sweethearts) she would permit more and more, so that the day’s vexations might end joyously. Many times had he felt a vital spark pass from her to him, and he could not but believe that she was conscious of it as well as he. Doll seemed not to realize his intent. As in the dark he approached his hands to her, she floated from him. Before her home was reached he came to fancy she had no body, or that by some charm (strong as that charm she had worked to bind him to her) she now had made a barrier about herself which he had not the physical strength to break.

He thought of Sara and her loving demon, Asmodeus, and wondered if such a fiend might not now be protecting her. And he wished he had never heard that holy story, for Sara, according to Sacred Writ, had seven husbands and each young man in turn had been strangled upon his marriage bed by the fiend Asmodeus, who loved her.

6

A young Christian witnesses an Awful Metamorphosis and shoots a bullet, but not a silver bullet.

The young man’s bodily fatigue was great, and his soul tormented. It grieved him to think that when at last he had gotten Doll Bilby by herself (and that upon a May night) it had profited him nothing. That night he could not sleep, but lay hot and lustful upon his bed. When he believed day about to dawn, he got himself into breeches, jerkin, hose, and shoes, and, having drunk a jorgen of ale, he went again to the search of Ahab.

Because there might be danger in the forest, he took with him his bastard musket. He came out of the house. It was not yet day. There was some light from the east, but it was a specious and unreal light, and the mists and fog from up over the sea were heavy and blue. He misliked the day.

First he looked about his own cow-pens and then about the cow-pens of his neighbour, for he knew the creature loved the company of his own kind and if alive would be like to return to them. There was neither bull, nor sign of bull. With his musket upon his shoulder, he took a path through Mr. Bilby’s meadows and came down to the smooth waters of the River Inch. He thought, ‘This Ahab is a greedy drinker. As soon as the sun is up he will get to the river and gorge himself with water.’ The fogs lay heaviest over the river, and they lay flat and white like piled counterpanes. Steadily the watery light grew from the east. He thought he would sit upon a boulder under a willow tree. The sun would soon shine out and drink up the fogs and dews of night. He kept his bastard musket on his knees, partly because the strangeness of the twilight vexed him, and partly because he knew that not far from him—no farther than he could shoot with his gun—was a path from out of the woods down which wild animals often came early to drink from the river. It was down this path he hoped to see Ahab, and in the meantime he might get venison for his mother’s larder. He sat quietly, and a doe stepped out, followed by twin fawns. But these he would not shoot, for their grace and smallness reminded him of Doll. Everything reminded him of Doll—the birds that sang, the flowers in the grasses, even the mystery and silence of the dawn. Yet these things should not have reminded him of a woman, but of her Maker.

In time he heard a crashing and breaking of twigs, and laughed to himself that he had read the bull’s thoughts so well, for nothing that lived in the forest would make such a commotion; only a domestic barnyard animal would carry himself so noisily. Nor was he disappointed, for out of the fogs and through the brush came the young bull, looking vast and large in the unreal light of dawn. He thought to let the creature settle himself to his drinking and then to steal up from behind him and catch his halter. So he sat quietly until he saw with astonishment that what he believed to be an Indian was astride him, and, having rigged reins to the halter, was endeavouring to turn him from the water.

To see a rider on Ahab did not surprise him, for he knew the bull had often carried even his little sisters, the puny Labour and Sorrow. It did astonish and anger him to see a savage in possession of his father’s property. So he called out roughly and forbade the man to turn the creature away from him. What next happened he never truly knew, for he was sure that the tawny (which at the instant seemed a large and ferocious brave) jumped from the bull’s back and made at him with his tomahawk. Titus knelt upon one knee and fired. In spite of the fogs and bushes that partly confused his sight, he took his aim most accurately against a bit of beadwork above the heart of his enemy. Now he saw this boy or man most clearly, the deerskin fringe to his jerkin, the feathers, the dark, angry face, the tomahawk, the patterns made by beads, and he knew that his aim was accurate and good; yet, even as the bullet sped to its mark, the Indian was there no more, and instead stood Doll Bilby with her hands clasped to her heart.

He knew the bullet went through her. When he first saw her, she was still staggering from the impact, but, when he reached her side and pulled away her hands (crying out and lamenting that he had killed her), there was no mark of blood upon her grey gown, and she assured him in a weak and frightened voice that she was unhurt. This gown Doll had on that day was made of strong fustian, and, as Mrs. Hannah always said, it had not a hole nor tear in it. Yet the next time Doll wore it there was discovered above the heart a minute and perfect patch, put on, evidently, to cover a hole no larger than a sixpence.

So great and so unreasonable was Titus’s love for Doll, he at first hardly considered the awful metamorphosis he had witnessed. Instead he was sick to think how close she had been to death.

As this story (which has just been set down in its true form) spread through the village, it grew incredibly larger in the mouths of certain people, and yet in the mouths of others it dwindled down into nothing. For the former of these insisted that Doll did not come alone, but was escorted by a vast troop of infernals, witches, etc., and that Ahab spoke to his master, making sundry infantile observations, such as might occur to the intelligence of a beast. Those who would make nothing of the story (and among these was Mr. Zelley) said Titus was no solid rock upon which to build the truth, and that his fancy had ridden him. There never had been an Indian upon the bull’s back, only Doll. He never had seen the beads, fringes, tomahawk. When he shot, his aim was confused and he had gone wide the mark.

Mr. Zelley, in his diary, quotes Scripture in regard to this curious incident, saying in part that Our Lord warns us against the putting of new wine into old bottles, lest the new wine prove too strong and burst the bottles. ‘So a torrent of feeling—especially when arising from the passions—is of the greatest danger to a weak container, and young Mr. Thumb is that weak container.’

At that moment, however, Titus had but one thought, and that was that at last the wench was in his arms, for she was so weakened by fear (or perhaps from the actual shock of the bullet) she could hardly stand. He comforted her, stroking her hair, kissing her, and saying over and over that he would have died rather than hurt a hair of her head. Concerning the fact that, but a second before, she had been in other shape and enjoying a different gender, he said nothing, for he thought that she might wish to remain mute concerning the matter, and then he thought: ‘It was because of kindness, at least if not towards me, towards the bull, that made this modest young female assume another shape. How could she, as a white girl, have ventured to the forest and found Ahab?’ So he said nothing. Now that at last his arms were about her, he felt none of the fire and anguish he had endured the night before; rather, it seemed to him, that he was caressing and comforting one of his own sisters. So he set her sideways on the bull, and took her to her own house.

By the time he had reached his father’s farm, he was once more swept by such inordinate and passionate desire he could not believe that earlier in the same morning he had kissed and comforted her, thinking her only a child—not even a witch and much less a woman.

CHAPTER III

1

Young Thumb dwindles. The witch torments him and her foster father discerns that she is not nor ever can be a Christian woman.

From the day on which Ahab was lost and recovered, Titus began a secret courting of Doll. Witch or no witch he would have no other. On the one side of him was his father, winking at him and pointing out the richness of Mr. Bilby’s fields, the weight of his cattle, the size of his barns. On the other side of him was his fond mother, whispering and whispering, ‘The girl’s a witch, she’ll come to no good end, she’ll hang yet, the girl’s a witch ... witch ... witch.’ Of all these matrimonial plans Mrs. Hannah knew nothing. She saw that Titus was much about the house, but, being very proud of her beauty (which was remarkable in a woman of her years), she believed in her own heart that she was the reason for the young man’s constant presence. She could not believe so handsome and sought after a young man could see anything to desire in the ridiculous hobgoblin-child. Doll Bilby flouted him at every turn, yet was he always after her, hungry as a cat for fish.

Many noticed, even by June and still more by July, that young Mr. Thumb was suffering from some malady that sapped strength from body, color from face, and dulled the eye. He was a listless worker in the fields, leaning upon his scythe, scanning the horizon, sighing, and weakly returning to his work. He ate little and slept less, so that his flesh fell away enormously, and, where four months before had stood a hale young man, now stood a haggard. He would mutter to himself, sit out in night vapours to consider the moon as it shone on the distant roof of Bilby’s house.

Thus things went from bad to worse. His mother noticed his condition and guessed its cause. She brooded over the young man, and this made him vexatious and bilious. When his little sisters had met (as they sometimes did, in spite of their mother) ‘Mistress Dolly’ by the willow brook, he would beg them to tell him everything the young woman said to them. How did they play? Did they build a little house of pebbles? Had they made dolls from stones? They would never tell him, but ran quickly away. The truth came out later. Doll amused them with stories of salamanders, elves, fairies, etc. They feared their mother would be angry if she knew—for she often had said that all the good stories were in the Bible, and if a story could not be found there it was proof that it was not good. So the twins ran away and told nothing of their visits with Doll. They often talked to each other, however, after they were in bed, and went on making up wicked things like those she had told them.

All her life Mrs. Thumb swore she knew her son’s distress was from no ordinary cause. If that were true, people asked her, how did she come to give consent to her son’s marriage with this same Doll? When she was an ancient lady, living in her son’s house at Cambridge, she once said: ‘I saw my son like to die, and he swore there was but one cure for him—that is, marriage with this young woman whom our magistrates later judged to be a witch. Therefore I said little to oppose the marriage. Then, too, at that time I placed much confidence in the wisdom of Mr. Zelley. He stood at my right hand, saying, “The girl is innocent. It will be a fine match.” Titus would cry out in his sleep for this witch-girl. How could I deny him when I thought it the only way to save his life?’

Hannah raged when she learned that the marriage was arranged (although nothing yet had been said to Doll). Bilby could not fathom her anger, for he thought she would be pleased to get the girl out of the house. He did not know that his wife believed herself the reason for Titus’s mopings and pinings. Indeed she had ordered for herself a new red riding-hood from Mr. Silas Gore, of Boston, so that she might have finery with which to fascinate the young man.

At last Doll knew she was to marry the good young man, for her foster father told her so. He told her roughly, for his heart broke to think of losing her to another. Sorrow made his tongue unkind. She would not listen to him, but, laughing, clung about his waist, saying she would never leave him, that he was the only man she could ever love. He wanted to keep her with him forever, but he knew that she was a strange girl, not like others, and he believed that if she were married she would become less secret and, having a house and children of her own, she would be happier.

Then, too, he knew that his wife was cruel to her, and he thought that it would be better for her to live under a roof where there was only love. It was in vain that he told her that she was now a woman grown, and it was time that she went about the business of women—that is, the bearing and raising of children. Did she have a deep aversion for her handsome and godly young neighbour? Would she not be proud some day to be a minister’s wife? No, no, never, never—she only wanted to be his dear foster child. He hardened his heart against her, and unwound her arms from about his waist. He told her to marry young Thumb, or to think up better reasons why she should not. He would not have such an ungrateful, stubborn woman about his house. If she did not wish to do as he wished, she could find another place to live. He never meant such hard words. He acted for her own best good. He pushed her from him, and made off to the fields.

She overtook him in a field of flax where the flowers were even bluer than the rare summer sky. The air was heavy with the murmur of bees. She flung herself on her knees and caught him by the long blue smock he wore.

‘Father,’ she cried, ‘wait, wait, I beg of you.’ She put her hands over her face and wept. He could have wept himself to see her thus. He hardened his heart and would have pushed by. She cried out she had something to tell him, so he waited silently, but without looking at her, for he was afraid that at the sight of her his heart would melt. She seized him by the hem of his smock and began to talk in a hoarse voice and a roaring voice like nothing he had ever heard out of her before. She had something to tell him, she said. There were reasons why she could not marry, especially not a young man who wished to be a minister. She feared she was not a Christian woman. She looked up at him from the ground, and he looked down upon her. Their eyes met, and in one horrid instant Mr. Bilby realized what it was she meant, why she feared she might not be a Christian woman. Of Evil she remembered everything, and at that moment he knew it.

He did not dare question her. He did not dare know what she knew. He essayed to comfort her and said he did not care who her parents really were. It mattered no more to him than who might be the sire of the cat that caught the mice in his barn. He also said what was not true, for he assured her that what one may have done or promised at a very tender age had no importance in the eyes of God. So he talked vaguely, and made off to his labours.

She left him and went to a secret spot she had among the birch trees on the hillside. She was not comforted, and her heart was hard set against the thought of marriage.

Those things which Doll told Mr. Bilby frightened him. He went straight to his neighbours that same afternoon and said the time had come when Titus, with his own tongue and in his own body, should do a little courting. Titus said how could he when Doll was never a flea-hop from her foster father’s heels? Thus it was arranged. Doll, that very night, should be left alone in her father’s house—Bilby and wife should go to Thumb’s. Titus would come to her, court her, and persuade her to marriage. After a sufficient time, all would return to Bilby’s and celebrate the happy betrothal with sack-posset, hymns, psalms, prayers, etc.

To this Titus and all agreed. Even Doll had nothing to say, but at her foster father’s bidding she put on her most wanton dress—a giddy dress of scarlet tiffany such as no pious woman would wish to possess.

2

A woman is seized by a Frenzy. And how a man may court without profit.

Now, when she found herself alone, she ran back and forth, back and forth, through the house. She locked and barred everything. She locked the cupboards and the doors and shuttered the windows. She went to the attic and locked the trunks, the boxes, the cribs, and the cases. She went to the cellar and bolted the door. Doors she could neither bolt nor bar, she barricaded. Even when this was done, she could not stop her strange running round and round the house, sometimes turning in small circles like a dog gone mad. She said over and over to herself, ‘I must be a witch, for I can feel myself weaving a charm.’ So she ran fast through the house, but there was nothing more to lock.

It was not yet seven o’clock and the evening was still light. Yet so closely had she barred and shuttered everything, the house inside was dark as midnight. Then she got old blankets, and in the end, in her desperation, new blankets, and tried to stuff the gaping chimney hole in the fire-room so that the whole house should be utterly barred and tight. But all the time (as she afterwards told Mr. Zelley) she would ask herself, ‘Why, why do I do these things?’ In the midst of her most desperate work with the chimney hole, she would stop and begin to run through the house—unable to stop herself. She thought to herself that she was working some charm or rather some charm worked within her. She was powerless before her great need to run back and forth, back and forth, through the locked and barred house.

Titus Thumb, dressed as though for a bridal and carrying a nosegay of lad’s-love and a turkey-leather psalm book for gifts, came proudly to the house, knocking to be let in. Doll heard him, for she was crouched upon the cold hearth of the fire-room, striving to stuff the chimney hole. She thought, ‘I will let him in, and then he can do this thing better than I.’

Titus was astonished to find the house dark and his lady’s hair a ragged black mat on her shoulders, her gay scarlet gown disordered and torn open at the throat, as though she had but recently wrestled with an enemy. And her face astonished him, for her cheeks were bright red. Fuller and more beautiful than ever before, her eyes glittered indeed like a goblin’s and her wide mouth was pulled up at the corners in a wicked but most provocative smile. She, in the dark house, seemed more like imp or puck than human woman. All that was human in him—that is, intelligence, conscience, reason, and so forth—was afraid and bade him turn back; yet all that was animal in him—that is, the hunger and desire of his body—urged him to enter. So he entered.

Already that awful necessity that had made her run so madly through the house was gone. She explained the blankets by the cold hearth, saying that they were damp, and that she had planned to build a fire and dry them out. So he built a fire. She explained her dishevelled condition. She had heard a rat in the cellar and had taken a poker and hunted for him. Could he not at that moment hear the rat scampering in the cellar? So he took a light and a poker and went to the cellar, and Doll, a little ashamed and frightened, quickly ordered her clothes and hair, and unlocked everything she could before he returned. Yes, he said, he found a rat and he had killed it. This surprised her, for she had really heard no rat, and the thought came to her that perhaps the Devil had sent that rat to excuse her conduct.

The young man sat on the settle with his head in his hands and prayed God to deliver his soul from the woman’s soul, and her body unto his. At last he spoke to her, his face turned away from her. He told her that she knew why he was come. He wished to marry her, and that he would be to her a true and loving husband. No, she said, she could not marry him. He was surprised, for Mr. Bilby had told no one of the young woman’s aversion to marriage. He had understood that he had only to ask and she would assent. He told her that it was all settled—the very spot on which their house should be built. How could she now so coldly say no? She only said again that she could not marry him—nor any other. ‘If that is so,’ he said, ‘I’ll take my hat and go.’ But why, if she had no idea of marrying him, had she so kept him at her heels? She had not kept him at her heels. She was always trying to rid herself of him. She knew that was not true. The very way she drew back from him was the surest encouragement a man could have. She said she thought he was talking nonsense. Her eyes glittered at him, round and bright in the firelight, like a cat’s.

He was afraid. He got up. He said again that he would take his hat and go. ‘I wish you would,’ said Doll. They could not find his hat. It seems that, while Doll was straightening herself and ordering the house (Titus at the moment ratting in the cellar), she had by chance picked up his hat, with many other things, such as the sooty blankets, and had stuck them under her own bed. So now they could not find his hat.

The young fellow was afraid, and now, as never before, he believed she was a witch. His blood pumped through him as though about to burst the veins; he knew that she wished this hat to work further charms upon him. But if she were so set upon charming him, making him her slave, why would she now have none of him? Why should she torture him, making him love her past all human endurance, and yet now so coldly dismiss him?

Doll said she was very sorry about the hat. ‘Oh, it is not the hat,’ he cried in despair, his head again in his two hands, ‘but, my dear Doll, why will you so torture me? Have I ever been anything but kind and respectful to you? Look what you have done. A year ago I was twice the man I now am. You have done it. You’ve sucked the strength and manhood out of my veins.’ Then he talked strangely so that she could not at first understand him. At last she understood him well. He believed that she had cast a witch spell on him, and had thus made him love her so beyond all reason. For, as he frankly told her, she really was not so wonderful nor half so beautiful, etc., as he had come to think her. He said he could remember back three years ago when he thought her a scrawny, rather ugly, little thing with too big a mouth.

All this made her very angry. She jumped up and down in her rage—more like an imp than ever—and screamed at him to be gone. She ran into her own room and came back with his hat—for she had guessed where it really was, but had not found an opportunity to get it for him. She jumped up and clapped the hat onto his head, pulling it down so sharply over his ears that she bent them, and continued to scream, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He grabbed her roughly by the arm, called her witch, hellcat, succubus. She turned and bit his wrist, so that it was marked for days. He pulled her off him, shook her with great fury, and flung her from him so that her head struck against the settle and she moaned in pain. Her plight touched his heart infinitely, and he knew that, witch or no witch, she was his dear, his own girl.

So the parents and foster parents, returning, found them. The man, a valiant officer in the militia, a scholar, and the heir to a fine estate, was convulsed with weeping and sobbing. The girl lay terror-stricken in the corner, as harmless as a trapped rabbit. Mr. Bilby had no idea that Titus had flung her into this corner. She was a strange child, and he thought she had picked it out for herself. He pitied the terrible (if somewhat unmanly) grief of the young man, and swore that, in spite of Doll’s ridiculous and, he felt, unnatural objections, the marriage must go ahead.

Mrs. Thumb took her son home, and Mr. Bilby took Doll to bed, and he comforted her with that more than female solicitude that a man often shows towards children or women in distress.

Mrs. Hannah was in a rage when she found her fine blankets blackened with dirty soot. Nor would Doll offer an explanation to her foster mother, although afterwards she told Mr. Zelley everything.

3

The voice of Hell is heard in the House of the Lord.

Mrs. Thumb went everywhere whispering: ‘Look to my son. Is he not bewitched? Look at my boy—so gentle he would not kick a cat, yet you all know that once he shot at this Doll Bilby, and but a few nights ago he struck her and flung her upon the ground. Then he cried for hours. I took him home. Is it according to God and Nature for a man to love thus? Hating her, loving her, loving her, hating her. Would God the wench were dead, but she is not, and he will marry her.’

Every one thought the girl a witch. She went her own way quietly, working as she always did, a little shiftlessly, her mind on other things.

The harvest was late that year and heavy. One year Nature would starve her stepchildren (for so the colonists felt in the new land) with too little, and the next year break their backs with too much. Mr. Bilby, harassed with many things, did a wrong thing. He went to Mr. Zelley and begged him on the next Sabbath to publish the banns for his foster child and young Thumb, and he led Mr. Zelley to believe that Doll had assented to these plans.

It may well be that Doll, in some secret way common to witches (that is, through some imp or familiar used as spy), really did know that upon a certain Sunday the banns were to be read. If she did know, she said nothing of this thing to any one, keeping her own dark counsel, and working her secret spells. On a Friday Mr. Bilby sickened slightly, and upon Saturday he could not touch his proper food, only a cheat-loaf she baked with her own hands for him, and a barley gruel. Mrs. Hannah always believed—and doubtless with reason—that the young woman was at the bottom of this sickening and was endeavouring to keep him from the Meeting-House, for when she heard he was set upon going she begged him not to go, saying he was too ill, etc., and must be ruled by her, etc., and sit at home in idleness.

But he would not be persuaded, and he went to church as always. She rode with him upon the pillion. Mrs. Hannah rode the fat plough horse.

By the windows and doors of the Meeting-House were nailed the grim and grinning heads of wolves, freshly slain. In the stocks before the Meeting-House were two Quaker women, the one in an extremity of despair and cold (for there was some ice upon the ground) and the other brazen, screaming out profanities and laughing in her disgrace. Upon the roof-walk paced back and forth Captain Buzzey, of the train-band troop, beating his drum in great long rolls, summoning all to come and worship.

Inside the Church Mrs. Hannah and Doll sat together on the women’s side, and Mr. Bilby, as befitted his station in the community, sat close to the minister. After certain psalms, prayers, etc., Mr. Zelley held forth from the Book of Judith for the space of two hours. There were announcements by the clerk, etc., and then Mr. Zelley again ascended the scaffold. Couched in proper form, he read how Titus, son of Deacon Ephraim Thumb, and Doll, foster child of Jared Bilby, engaged themselves for holy wedlock and desired the pronouncement of these banns.

His voice was drowned by a sharp and most piteous lamentation. At first none knew from where this infernal sound had come. Deacon looked to deacon, wife to wife. Mr. Cuppy, the tithing-man, ran up and down among the wretched small boys. Mr. Zelley stopped in astonishment, looking first up, as if he thought the sound had come from the corn crib in the loft of the Church—or from Heaven—and then down, as though seeking its source from Hell. Doll Bilby was on her feet, her arms outstretched, addressing her foster father. Her voice rose and died out. None there could ever repeat what it was she said. That noon, in the noon-house, between the two services, men and women got together whispering, wondering, and asking each what it was that Bilby’s saucy jade had—to her own unending shame and to the great indignity of the sacred service—dared to pipe forth.

Mr. Zelley—the least disturbed of all—saw to it that Bilby and his beloved Doll be got to horse and to home, without waiting for the second service. He was perplexed and harassed by the occurrence, and refused to discuss with his deacons what would be a fitting punishment for the young woman, although most were agreed that it would be the stocks or the pillory. Instead of listening to the discussions in the noon-house, he went out of doors and stood before the evil women in the stocks, exhorting them in the name of Christ Jesus to repent and to be forgiven. Theodate Gookin, a stout child, mocked them and pelted them with small apples. This action of the child enraged Mr. Zelley more than had the foul blasphemies of the Quakers. He roughly ordered Theodate to lay off his own warm overcoat. This he spread kindly upon the back of the most insufferable of the blasphemers. By which act of charity, he stilled her lying tongue, and reproved the levity of the child who would sport about and enjoy himself on the Lord’s Day.

4

Evil cursing bears bitter fruit. Mr. Bilby, though struck down, swears to the innocency of his Destroyer and makes a Pious End.

Bilby went stiffly to his horse, his mouth drawn, his face grey. His wife got on the pillion behind him and soon left Doll (on the fat work animal) far behind. When the girl got to the house, she did not seem to understand why her foster mother shook her fist, spat, and made at her with a warming-pan. She did not seem to know that she had cursed the man—that kind man, whom she loved.

Mr. Bilby suffered from a cruel congestion of the lights. Mr. Kleaver said from the first there was little chance to save him. For on one day came the surgeon, with his saddle-bags stuffed with motherwort and goldenrod, and on the next came the minister with his big Bible, and on the third day they were like to send for Goody Goochey, the woman who had the laying-out of the dead—so sick was he.

But he delayed his passage into eternity, fighting death with hardly Christian resignation; for to your true Christian the years spent on this world must seem but as the nine months which the child spends in the womb. His death-day is in fact his birthday into the kingdom of God. Should he fight against death any more than the infant should fight against birth?

There were gathered in his sick-chamber night and day rarely less than ten or twelve people, praying for the departure of this fell disease, or, if this were impossible, they prayed in the hope of giving the shrinking soul a heavenward lift.

Mr. Bilby bade them save their breath, and, although his face was settling into lines of death and he breathed horribly and with an animal roaring, he still begged, as he had from the first, for a sight of his child Doll. The room was then cleared of the pious exhorters, who returned to the Thumb farm and there prayed and drank rumbullion. Only Mr. Kleaver, Mr. Zelley, and the wife remained. Mr. Zelley commanded Hannah to find the child, and Hannah, frowning, went away, but she came back soon and said she was not about. The truth is the woman had struck and cursed the girl so savagely that now, when she heard her name called, she did not dare to come.

The doors of the death-chamber were shut and sealed. Camphor was burned on the hearth; then the wife stood by her husband’s side, and, in the presence of Mr. Zelley and the surgeon, asked him three times and in a loud voice whether or not he believed he died of a curse pronounced upon him by his foster child. Mr. Bilby rallied his wits, and, in spite of the agony of his breathing, he stoutly denied the charge. But some (among them Hannah) believe that he was already dead when he seemed to speak, and that an evil spirit had succoured Doll by leaping into the head of the corpse and thus making answer. For he spoke up in a loud, clear voice, and yet one in no way like his own, and the next moment he was not only dead, but looked as though he had been dead for a half-hour or hour at the least.

5

Doll forswears the God of our Deliverance and embraces Beelzebub who prepares (for her instruction) a PROCESSION.

The four days Bilby was dying, Doll spent in the hayloft—night and day. She had over-heard the farm servants talking, and she knew of what she was accused and why it was Hannah would not let her into the house. She remembered that strange time when she had run and run through the house, working, she knew, a spell, or rather feeling a spell work through her, and she was sick to think that perhaps she had some power she did not understand, and had really put a charm upon her dear foster father when she had not intended. Perhaps it was also true that unknown to herself she had bewitched Titus Thumb. None went to her or knew where she lay but the youngest of the indentured servants, a good and gentle lad. This boy brought her food and water. When it was night he went to his poor lodgings in the cow-shed and took a blanket from his bed and gave it to her.

From the loft Doll stared down at the house and yard, and could guess, by the close attendance of the surgeon and the clergyman and by the multitudes gathered to pray, how sick he was. Every morning she saw Hannah go early to the dunghill and catch a fowl. This bird Doll knew would be laid for warmth at the sick man’s feet, for under the dark covers the creature lay quietly and gave off a good and healing warmth, yet was no bird imprisoned longer than twenty-four hours lest its heat be translated into the chill of death.

On the fourth day—that is, the day on which Mr. Bilby died—Doll determined to leave the loft and if possible to find Goody Greene, who would at least tell her how her father did. Perhaps Greene might stay his sickness, for Doll had more confidence in her and her herbs than in Mr. Kleaver and his bleeding-cups. At this time of year the woman often went to the Bilby river meadows after an herb called ‘Love-lies-bleeding,’ so Doll, finding the opportunity to slip out unseen by any, got from the loft and decided first to hunt for her Sister-in-Evil along the riverbanks. She dared not pass through the town.

She sat by the river until sundown, crying long and bitterly. She remembered that time Titus had found her there, and cried afresh—for even those had been happier days.

Wherever she went she found the flower stems were broke off close to the ground, and she saw the print of a small Indian moccasin in the mud. She knew that Goody Greene (being a pauper) wore these moccasins and that her feet were small, so she followed this trail, and this led her to the great forest. Here she paused, for she feared it. But she feared the cruel suspicions of her foster mother more, so she took a farewell look about her at the pastures and fields, and, finding a small path (still seeing here and there a moccasin print), she entered boldly.

It would seem, then, that another of those fits of senseless weaving back and forth overtook her. She knew the danger of being lost in this great wood, and she had not for a long time seen a footprint. Suddenly she began to run through the woods on those little paths beaten out by animals, hunters, and Indians. She could not pause either to consider her direction or to determine what it was she really sought, for she had almost forgotten the idea of finding Greene. The sun had set and the November night was coming down fast. The gloom and overwhelming silence weighed her down. She began to think that she smelt smoke or saw the glimmer of a fire. Wherever she looked she could see light smouldering in the underbrush. Sometimes she thought there were hundreds of tiny Indian encampments, with teepees but a few inches high, and, because she knew of Goody Greene’s fondness for Indians, she tried to come to these miniature encampments. She also knew that she was lost (although this knowledge did not horrify her as it would a reasonable person), and not only did she wish the goodwife’s company, but she needed the warmth even of the smallest fire, for the night was frosty cold.

At last, after much running, sniffing, and circling, she came to a small cleared spot, where she always maintained she found a fire burning, and over this fire was a great pall of black smoke. So she gathered more twigs and fagots, and built up the fire—not knowing that she only made a heap of rubbish upon the cold wet ground. At least her ‘fire’ seemed to warm and comfort her. She lay back upon the moss and fell quickly into deep sleep.

After some time, she waked, startled, for she heard her name called. ‘Bilby’s Doll! cried the voice, ‘Bilby’s Doll!

‘Yes,’ she answered, springing up from her unhappy bed. There was no answer to her ‘yes.’ Whatever it was, she considered her ‘fire’ was almost out. ‘Who calls?’ she cried, and her voice echoed and the awful silence of night mocked at her in solitude.

Then at last, being wide awake, she realized with terror and dismay that the voice that called her was none other than that of her dear foster father. Yet would he never have called her thus, saying ‘Bilby’s Doll,’ but ‘Doll’ only.

Then she knew that he was dead, and that she would never see him again. It was his lonely spirit, fresh torn from the earthly body, that had stopped this moment on its heavenly flight to cry out to her thus sadly. She flung herself, moaning, upon the ground, unable to shed a tear. Witches, she knew, have no tears, and she realized with horror that her tears had dried up. She began to pray to ‘Dear God in Heaven....’ She heard a rustle in the forest, and then low and malicious laughter. She stopped her prayer. After a moment of writhing and moaning, she prayed again—‘Infinite Master, Lord God of Israel ... I never meant to hurt him. He was the only person I have ever loved. I never meant to kill him....’ ‘Why, then, did you curse him?’ asked a voice, and she again heard malicious laughter. She would have found relief for her remorse in tears, but there were no tears, nor did they ever come to her again.

She felt the presence of a large and probably dangerous animal about, so she flung more wood on her ‘fire.’ She listened to its padded feet, and told herself it was lynx or wolf, yet in her heart she hoped and feared that it might be at last a messenger from that infernal King to whom she now was convinced her parents had promised her. For, between the moment that she heard a voice call ‘Bilby’s Doll’ and that moment in which she had felt a corporeal presence in the wood, she had become fully convinced that she was a witch with all the powers that belong to such an evil estate.

Slyly she made one last appeal to Jehovah, for she thought that He might even for so evil a one as her own self make His awful majesty manifest. ‘O God, who seest all things, who rulest above, O Great God of Israel, give me a sign, give me a sign....’ Then in her impudence she lifted up her impious voice and commanded God, ‘Put back the soul of Jared Bilby, for it is not yet gone far and his body is yet warm. Do this and I will serve You. Desert me now, and I wash my hands of You and Your cruel ways!’ The rustling and the commotion crept nearer. No angel this thing which approached her on its belly. She stared, expecting to see horned head and grinning demon face. She saw nothing. She cried once more to God. The solitude echoed her voice with laughter. Then she cried to the powers of Hell below and to the Prince of Lies, ‘Great King of Hell, if I serve you, you must serve me’ (for she knew this was a stipulation in a witch’s contract). ‘I will do anything, sign any book, if you will but give me back the soul of Jared Bilby.’ But this poor soul was now in the keeping of angel hosts. Not Lucifer himself could snatch it from such guardians. As she thought thus, a windy voice cried, ‘Too late, too late.’ ‘Satan, you shall give me a sign,’ she cried. And there close to the ground were two great cat’s eyes, larger than saucers. They glared at her with a green hellish light that transpierced the darkness and her very soul.

She cried out desperately to those eyes, ‘Whoever you are, step forth. I will do anything, sign any book. Tell me now, in Satan’s name, is there no way back to life for Jared Bilby? For it was I, I, I, who slew him—with a witch’s look. Oh, kind spirit, if you are old, I will be your daughter; if you are young, I will be your bride—stand forth now to me.’

The yellow eyes turned from her as she struggled with her unhallowed thoughts, and the thing was gone. Far away, mile after mile, a voice no bigger than a sparrow’s cried sadly to her, and in great agony of spirit, ‘Bilby’s Doll....’ She thought to run after the voice, to catch the naked soul in her hands. Of what avail? Gone already a thousand miles. In the littlest voice, no larger than voice of flea or worm, she heard once more her foster father cry to her, ‘Bilby’s Doll....’

She knew that, as there are certain forms and incantations for the destruction of life, so must there be others for the rekindling of it. What had Our Lord said before the tomb of Lazarus? Could she but remember the words she herself had said in church—perhaps by repeating them backwards she could countermand the curse.

She fell to the ground in an ague, and lay sobbing dryly, exhorting the powers of Hell. Twigs snapped in blackness about her. Feet padded in silence.

The cold of the night, the terror of her soul, the dearth of food, the sorrow of her heart struck her into a stupor from which she could not move. Through this stupor, in steady procession, and with much pomp and circumstance, a long parade of figures, fiends, witches, warlocks, imps, beasts, familiars, satyrs, and even the beautiful chaste Diana herself, moved in fleshly form: a wicked, most fantastic procession. Goblins were there with faces of cats and owls, salamanders but lately crawled from fire. Basilisks were there, serpents, vampires with bats’ wings and horrid mouths swollen with blood. The pretty pink bodies of innocent babes were there, who had died unbaptized, and therefore must stand as servants in the halls of Hell, and with them were pucks and pugs.

After them rolled through the forest a great orange cloud—like an old and tarnished fire—no longer heat-giving. At first her eye could make nothing of it. Then she saw projecting through the dun vapours were naked legs and arms, bits of bodies, and drawn and skull-like heads with tortured eyes. These were they the French burned at Mont Hoël in Brittany. Although she might not know them, her parents were among them. A group came slowly after these, shrouded and shuffling through the woods. In the midst of these she saw Goody Greene. This woman, alone of all the passers-by, turned and looked towards Doll. But her eyes were blind.

Last of all came Ahab shaking his black head, a cowslip hanging from his blue lips. She would sleep and wake, but the procession would still be passing by, and every so often Ahab would pass by. The woods were humming-full with an infinity of unearthly things. There was continuous lovely singing—or rather a rhythmic humming that rose and fell and rose again.

6

With daylight the tides of Hell recede. Doll wakes but to a more determined Evil.

At last she awoke to see, not the procession of Hell, but bright day. The humming, however, still continued in her head, rising and falling, but not going away. She was frozen cold to her marrow. Now the loss of her foster father had become a tiny thing infinitely far away and long, long ago. All her previous existence seemed removed from her as if again a barrier had come down upon her, shutting one part of her life from the next. So, although she thought sadly of the kind man’s death, it already seemed one with the destruction of her parents—that is, a thing which has happened long back in childhood.

She recalled to herself the story of a girl who had slept in a fairy-wood for a hundred years, and she looked fearfully at her hands, expecting them to be gnarled with a century. But they were as they always had been. Her hair about her shoulders was black. She thought that it was possible (and at that time it even seemed most probable) that, although her body might have retained its youthful form, a great flight of time had passed. She would go back to Cowan Corners to find the dark forest had swallowed it. There would be cellar holes lost in thickets, where Boston, Salem, Cowan Corners, Ipswich, etc., had stood. She felt herself alone upon a whole continent. Her body had grown so light and so unreal, she scarce could stand, nor was she wholly convinced of her own reality until she observed she still could cast a shadow.

Doll Bilby had always longed for the comforts of religion, so it was natural that she, having as she believed just witnessed a manifestation of her ‘god,’ should now reverently stand and give thanks. She called upon her Father in Hell, thanking him that he had made manifest to her visible proof of his greatness. She called upon her father and mother, blessed them in the great name of Hell, and promised to serve them. She called upon all that vast host of evil things, blessed them, and promised to serve them.

So she floated lightly forth, intent to see the place where Cowan Corners once had stood. Voices called her through the wood, and these she knew were true voices of men, not the eerie cries of ghosts or demons. She answered, ‘Here am I.’

Four men came to her, nor was one of them a minute older than he had seemed last Sabbath at Meeting. Mr. Zelley cried out in pity, for her five days of despair, suffering, and even the astounding pleasures of the night before, had marked the face of Doll Bilby, altering its pretty childish shape.

‘My child,’ he said, ‘you need not have run away. There is no reason to believe Mr. Bilby’s death due to anything but nature. Such a congestion of the lights is not uncommon and often results in death. Doll, as he lay dying, we questioned him if he was worked upon by any witchcraft, and he cried in a loud voice, “I die spirit free.”’

Doll wept with her hands over her face. None saw that she shed no tears. But she knew that the springs of her tears had dried in the night. Mr. Zelley kissed her gently upon the forehead, and with that kiss he entered into pact with her, for after that he cherished her and became at last her confidant in all things, even in all evil things. And he had once been a minister of God.

Mr. Zelley walked by her side. The three other men looked at her doubtfully, thinking each to himself, ‘This young woman is a murderess and a witch.’ They soon outdistanced the minister and the woman, so it was he alone who took her back to her own home.

He told her that from now on, for a little space of time, life would be hard for her. She must live peaceably in the house with Hannah (there was no other place for her to go). She must, by a godly, upright, and virtuous life, and by the goodness of her conversation and dignity of her demeanour, give the lie (he said) to all those who would with tedious rustic simplicity believe her a witch. Both he and Mr. Kleaver knew Mr. Bilby died by nature and not by art. She was, moreover, in all things to trust him. He would clear her name (he said). He had power among these people (he hoped). She was to be of good heart, and the Lord God would be with her. Also he promised to come to her often, praying with her, and strengthening her.

So he took her to her door. In the yard they saw the two indentured servants nailing together a wooden coffin. A group of serious men stood, watching them, and discussed the mutabilities of life, etc. Now and again one helped himself at the barrel of cider that had been rolled out to accommodate their thirst (for thirst is like to rise from serious discourse and ponderous thought).

Mr. Zelley took her within the house. The ovens were fired and pots boiled on the hearth. There was the leg of a great ox on a spit over the coals. The little turnspit dog, which ordinarily served at the tavern, had been brought over to serve for the sad yet pleasing occasion. He turned the spit, as he had been trained to do. His eyes were red and rheumy. The hair was burned away from his hind quarters, and they were red and scorched. Doll remembered how often her foster father at the tavern had given scraps of food to this same miserable small dog, and how he called it ‘Old Father Time’ even when it was a pup, for it had always seemed bent, wizen, and full of many cares. She turned away her head.

The house was full of neighbour women who had come to help prepare the funeral meats. Doll entered. All found reason they must go to the milk-house, the cellar, the barn, the pantry, or to the best room where the corpse lay and the widow sat in black. Doll and Mr. Zelley were left alone except for a squat and horrid form, who stood its own and feared no woman nor man nor witch. This was the form of Goochey, she who had the laying-out of the dead. She had a face and voice like a man’s. Indeed many believed that she was a man who, perhaps having committed offence in the Old World, had fled, thus disguised, to the New. She came from the Welsh borders, and would never touch a corpse unless she had first set upon her hands ten iron rings—one to each finger; for she feared that, without this protection, the spirit of the corpse might enter her veins and thus havoc her body.

When Doll saw this dwarfish man-woman standing in the fire-room, fitting iron rings to her fingers, she shrank from her in horror. Goody Goochey muttered at her, and Mr. Zelley was distressed because he believed she was calling the distrait young woman a witch. However, such was the hoarseness of Goochey’s voice and such was the coarseness of her nature, he could not be sure. She might have been calling her another, no more flattering, but surely less dangerous, epithet. Mr. Zelley sincerely hoped so, for he was far more concerned with the reputation of Doll than he was with the good or bad language of Goochey.

CHAPTER IV

1

Two Women sleep in the House of Hate. Doll Bilby, having ruined the fortunes of a Student of Divinity, now turns her powers upon a DIVINE.

As soon as the harvest was in and the grave of Jared Bilby was filled, winter came raging in with unwonted ferocity. It came in foot after foot of dazzling snow, at first snowing only in the night, the sun sparkling out brightly in the daytime. But by the New Year (the snow already standing up to the window-sills and over the fences) the winter grew black. There was no sun, and such storms blew from out the north and northeast as none had ever seen or heard of before. There was no ceasing of wind, snow, and black days. The sea roared continuously, like a thousand lions seeking food from a false god.

The dead could not be buried. The cattle froze. The wolves went to the barnyards killing sheep, pigs, cattle, horses. A woman found a lynx among her ducks. The deer came out of the forest, joining the dairy herds, seeming to ask food of man and shelter in his barns. Such was the cruel winter that settled down on the dead man’s house, where lived his widow and adopted child.

These two women lived alone, shut off together from the world in solitude. They lived almost without speaking and in hate. The two farm servants slept in the cow-sheds, and often afterwards said they dreaded even to enter that gloomy house, where the two women sat watching each other, hating and being hated.

As was his duty, Mr. Zelley came often to see them. The snows were so deep he could not travel by horse, so he came on snowshoes with his Bible under his arm. Each woman he saw separately, praying with her and trying to comfort her. What he said to Mrs. Hannah all heard as soon as the roads were broken out and she was out among her gossips, but what he said to Doll no one knew, although in after years much that she said to him was known. Mrs. Bilby said that once he came out of Doll’s chamber like a soul spewed out of Hell. He looked roundabout him wildly as if he had seen a most frightful sight or heard most frightful things. Without as much as a word for the woman (who hoped he would pause and elucidate for her certain problems she had found in Leviticus), he seized upon a bottle of rumbullion, swallowed half of that, and made out of the house as though the devils were after him. The truth is on that day Doll had confessed to him that she was a witch.

Up to this time he had always praised the Christian fortitude, the piety, the humbleness, and sobriety of Bilby’s Doll. But after that he came to be much agitated at the mere mention of her name, shaking his head, exclaiming, ‘Dear me,’ or mentioning the fact that we are all miserable sinners. He was about the Bilby house more than ever, seeing Doll always alone and in her own chamber.

When it was said that Doll was a witch, he would reprove the speaker, sadly bidding him keep such light thoughts on serious matters to himself. Of course the Bible proves to us that there were witches in the days of Leviticus and Kings—but to-day ... now, he was not sure such things exist.

‘Then you do not believe that Jonet Greene...?’

‘There does not live a more excellent Christian. Fools call her a witch because she begins to lean upon her staff and she has a wandering eye. Many do so and have such.’

‘Nor yet in the justice done upon the bodies of certain witches in Boston?’

‘I will not judge of Boston. I speak only of Cowan Corners.’

By these beliefs he gained some friends and lost others. If one does not believe in witches, how can one believe in devils, and if not in devils, how then in Hell?—and Hell is, as all know, the fundamental principle on which good conduct and Christian faith are built.

The women in the Bilby house rarely spoke. Each knew her own duty and did it. The indentured servants kept to the barn, so there was no noise but the swish of the women’s skirts or brooms, the rattle of cooking ware, the slam of a door. Even the house dog, grown old and deaf, never barked. The cats, five in all, partook of the silence. They slipped from room to room, eyeing the women suspiciously, but without half the suspicion with which Hannah eyed them.

On a cold night, Gideon, a big malty tom, being chill, sought animal warmth. He jumped upon Widow Bilby’s bed. She woke gagged with fear. She seized Gideon and, in spite of the clawing that shredded her arms, strangled him.

The next day with an axe she killed every cat in the house. This brutal slaughter of innocent and pretty pets dismayed Doll almost beyond endurance. She had loved and fed every one, and they often slept upon her bed at night. Filled with abomination towards the woman, she thought at least to give her a headache, or in some way work her a small harm. She looked about for nail paring or wisp of hair with which she might fortify a poppet and work magic against the woman. She found to her astonishment that Hannah evidently suspected her, for any combing from her hair was instantly burned, and she never pared her nails except over a dark cloth which she shook out into the fire. While she did these things, she would look slyly at Doll, as if to say she understood her game, and would take every precaution against her. So she had done ever since her husband died, but Doll did not notice this precaution until February.

Much of the time Doll lay in her own room upon her own narrow bed, and prayed to the Prince of Hell that he send some instructor or messenger to her ... but thus far only Mr. Zelley came to instruct her. She looked forward to the spring with longing, and because of a dream she had three times concerning a young man asleep in a bed of violets (yet the man she knew, even as she gazed at him, was infernal), she came to believe that in spring, when the violets blossom, a messenger would come.

By February, the roads being broken, Widow Bilby was again about, but Doll in her discontent walked solitary. She saw no one except perhaps once in a long time Goody Greene, and once a week Mr. Zelley (whom she filled full of the phantasies of her childhood). She did not go to Church, and this shocked and angered the whole community, although Mr. Zelley himself insisted that she was too weak and sick to take the hard trip on horseback. Of her neighbours, the Thumbs, she saw nothing. Titus (because of the stories which Widow Bilby told his mother, and she, in turn, told him) went in daily terror of his life. He believed Doll had a poppet of him. If his head ached, it was because she pinched or pricked the head of the poppet. Were it his stomach, lights, bowels, that hurt him, he thought she was rubbing poison on the belly and body of this same poppet. When a black sow he had raised up by hand suddenly jumped into the air and fell dead, he thought she had in passing glanced at it.

Of all things, however, Titus most feared Ahab, the black bull, who had, from the day Doll found him in the forest, changed his gentle nature to one most ferocious and perverse. He urged his father to butcher the animal before it took human life. The deacon said it would be gluttonous to put into the stomach such costly steaks, roasts, etc., and any man who did so deserved to have his bowels rot.

2

Showing that the Sun will always shine again, no matter how black the Winter.

The winter had come early, but (contrary to country superstition) it remained late. For April was full of the racketing of wind, and May was drenched and all but drowned in rain. Not until the end of that month did the earth rally from adversity, and there come still and sunny days. The skies were of heavenly blueness, crossed only by herds of fleecy clouds, as sweet and innocent as wandering lambs. The grass grew green and was prettily pied with multitudes of little flowers. The fruit trees glanced but once at sun and sky, then burst into rapturous blooming. The beauty of these trees is not idle and barren. Their deeds (that is, their fructuation) is as good as their promise (or blossoming). Man may enjoy the loveliness of these flowers, knowing that their loveliness is one of accomplishment.

Special lectures were held at the Meeting-House, giving thanks (where thanks were due) for the beneficent weather, the fertility of all things, the abundance of fish, game, wild foods, and good health of the community. In his praying Mr. Zelley (so it was observed) twice asked with particular passion that the old hatreds, the old jealousies, and the old cruel superstitions might be left behind, and that, in the new land, the spirit of man might break forth as a chick breaks the egg.

The widow’s house had stood fast-shuttered for six months. Now it was open to sun and gentle breeze. Doll had been pale, sad, all winter; now she felt the gladness of the earth singing about her in the sweetest voice, calling her to set aside the dark mantle of the soul to take on joy, hope, and even pleasure. She felt frolicsome (as she had often felt with her foster father) and played with the calves and colts, secretly met the Thumb twins by the boundary brook, and filled them full of devilish lies.

She went again to the Meeting-House, and even wantonly enjoyed herself during service, for she found that (such were her latent powers for harm), by merely twisting her fingers together and staring hard at Deacon Pentwhistle as he led the psalm singing, she could twist his throat so that he broke off into a coughing fit. Once, on seeing Titus enter the pasture where Ahab grazed, she slyly and only by thought ordered the creature to have at the young man. Behold! She had the inimitable pleasure of seeing Ahab make at him, and Titus barely reached a tree in time to save his limbs. If Ahab had gained too much on this swift and willing runner, she would have crossed her legs and this would have stopped the bull, for she wanted her old lover frightened, but neither maimed nor slain.

Mr. Zelley continued to wrestle with her in prayer, begging her to believe that she could not be a witch because he (being little better than an atheist) thought such things could not exist. He always claimed that he strove to save her soul. She rewarded him by destroying his. She went often to his house and read in his library, especially of all such books as the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ and ‘Sadducismus Triumphatus,’ etc., which treat of witches and witchcraft, for she was unskilled and wished to learn proper charms and methods for working evil. She also questioned Goodwife Greene. Still she never could learn (except by accident) how to do any of the things she wished. She could not even summon the Devil, who, when he came, came as pleased him—not to her order.

3

An Intimation comes to Doll that some Infernal is about. She believes that he whom she (in wicked abomination) worships will soon send sign to her.

On a morning she awoke, knowing she must go to Greene’s house. ‘I must see Goody Greene,’ she thought. ‘I must talk to Goody Greene.’ She left the pots unwashed, the room unswept. She put on neither coat nor hat, but went as she was, for the day was warm. Now the new year seemed to promise great things, and she felt confident these things she would find. There was every happiness close to her, hiding, waiting to be found. Through these pleasant and cheerful thoughts came racketing the clangour of a brass bell and the terrible blasting of a fish horn, and the voice of man (in this case the voice of the town crier) tolled out to her and to all the world those things that were lost.

Mr. Minchon, the crier, put the fish horn under his arm and took the brass bell by the clapper.

‘Gone away!’ he cried. ‘Gone away! Gone away! Four pirates from the Boston Jail, one day before their trial. Calico Jack and Black Pig Murch, Ben Bottle and the Bloody Shad. Likewise, from the pasture of Deacon Thumb, one priceless bull known to you all, the young bull Ahab.’ (Ding-dong! Ding-dong!)

‘Lost or stole, lost or stole, a wallet and the money in it of Captain Tom Buzzey, for he put it on the tavern step, turned, and it was gone. Lost or stole, the wallet of Tom Buzzey—a wallet with the money in it.’ (Ding-dong!) Mr. Minchon, blowing again upon his fish horn, took himself and his sad news of things lost or things stolen to the next street corner; there, having gathered a crowd about him, he proclaimed again. He moved again and yet again. Knowing the matter of which he spoke, Doll could even at a long way recognize the names of the four pirates, for he always began with full lungs, so she heard four times the crying out of these names, Calico Jack and Black Pig Murch, Ben Bottle and the Bloody Shad, but of Captain Buzzey’s loss she heard but once, for Mr. Minchon arrived at it with spent ardour and small voice. Doll continued on her way to Greene’s hut.

Between the house of Mr. Zelley and the House of God, she met seven Indians who walked the one after the other, with feet silent as panther paws. They were dressed in the paint and regalia affected by their chief men, in the hope of giving to their persons, by external and childish methods, that true dignity which never can come from without but arises only from the soul. The Indians passed (as they always do) without so much as glancing at the white woman, but she gazed hard upon them, thinking that perhaps they really were devils—as many ignorant people then believed—and that the sign or messenger which she had come to look for constantly would be from them. As she watched, a feather floated or rather seemed to be lifted from the headgear of one of these, and, after wavering a second, it came to rest at her feet. This was a scarlet feather with a yellow tip to it. She stooped to it, and hid it in her bosom, looking longingly after the seven chief men, thinking that having vouchsafed her this favour they might sign her to follow them. They did not.

She went her way, but she went exulting, with red cheeks and smiling mouth. The young men she passed at the tavern drew back that she might not cast a roving eye upon them and desire them, for they all knew of the bewitchment by which she had afflicted Thumb. They guessed, by the unaccustomed red of her cheek and the sparkle of her eye, that (spring having come again) she was wandering about looking for a new young man to devour. The young men stood back; Doll went her way.

She came to the waste marshes by the sea on which sat the tinker’s hut. She rapped on the door and cried out her own name. The woman did not call ‘Come in,’ as was usual, and Doll heard rustlings, whisperings, tramplings, within. She thought how this woman, like herself, was a witch. Her heart beat quicker with the (to her) delightful thought that perhaps at that very moment she had discovered Greene in confab with some fiend spirit or familiar, and that was why the door was not opened to her, that was why there were rustlings from within. Then Goody Greene opened the door and with her usual affection drew the girl into her miserable house, kissed her, and put out the stool, a jointstool, for her to sit on. Greene went on with her own business which was concerned with sorting out into heaps dried toadstools and mushrooms.

Doll stared at her and saw how hard the pulse throbbed in the old woman’s neck, how her hands shook at her work, how again and again she swallowed as if choked by an oppressive secret. But the girl could not tell the woman she thought her a witch and say, ‘I would like to see the familiar I know must be close by,’ for the moment she stopped upon the threshold she was aware that she and the goodwife were not alone. She could feel the air tremble about her; she could almost hear it, all but see it. It was there, close in the one room of the hut, with them. It had not flown at her coming; it had hid itself. She saw that the hangings upon the bed were drawn. ‘It is yonder,’ she thought; ‘the fiend hides in the bed behind drawn curtains.’ She was sick with fear, but her hopes rode high. She took from her bosom the feather the Indian had dropped. What did Goody Greene think of the feather? Greene said it was a bright and pretty feather, and proved the Indians to be more skillful than we in dyeing. But did it mean nothing more to her than that? No, nothing more. She put it back into her bosom. What would Goody do with so many fungi? She would mix them with snake fat and cure rheumatics. She said she did not know snakes had any fat. Greene said that any distillation from flesh was called ‘fat.’ Then they sat for a long time without speaking.

Doll helped with the sorting.

Doll thought to herself, ‘Be my friend, Goody Greene; confess you are a witch, show me your familiar, and we will work magic together, for I cannot bear to be so lonely.’ The woman set a pot on the fire to make a gruel for dinner. She put three handfuls of maize into the pot. Doll asked her, ‘Does the goodman come back for dinner?’ ‘No,’ said Greene, ‘I put in the extra handful by mistake.’ This was very strange, thought Doll, but in her mind made note of the fact that a familiar will condescend to eat maize gruel like a poor man. It distressed Doll that the woman would not trust her and produce her familiar.

The woman squatted before the pot, Doll knelt beside her, and, because she was sick with bitter loneliness, she pressed her face against the woman’s sleeve and said, ‘You are the only mother I have ever had since I was a tiny child, and I, Goody Greene, I am the only child you ever had.’ The woman let the wooden spoon slip from her fingers so that it was lost in the gruel, and Doll, who jumped up to fetch her another one, saw from the corner of her eye that she glanced at the bed. ‘Ah,’ thought Doll, ‘perhaps she has made herself a popinjay from broom or rags or scarecrow, and calls this thing “son.” Perhaps that is what she has about her in this room—and in the bed most likely.’

As they ate their dinner (of which there was far too much for the two women), Doll asked Greene to tell her again some of those old stories by which she had enchanted her as a child. Greene told her of the unfortunate earl’s daughter, who consented to a boat ride with a handsome stranger-man. (The masts were of gold, but did not bend before the wind. The sails were of taffety, and did not fill with the breeze.) They sailed three leagues and then she spied his cloven hoof and wept most bitterly, knowing it was no man but a devil with whom she must cope.

Greene told her other ungodly stories from an ungodly antiquity. Doll questioned her at every turn. She must know how each magic trick was worked; she must hear how it was Fair Jennifer of Bageley Wood called her demon to her. Greene told her the true story of how a lycanthropic man, believing himself to be a wolf, killed fifteen in the Midlands before the soldiers got him. She told her of Queen Mab and her tiny tinsel court. At last Doll got to her feet to go. She heard the bed creak, and saw a moving lump bulge out the drawn curtains. But the familiar did not make itself manifest. As Greene stared at the hearth, Doll slyly drew the red and yellow feather from her bosom and, brushing by the bed, she slipped the feather within. Calling a hasty good-bye, she left abruptly, and began to run, for she (in spite of hopes) half feared a great, scaly, black fiend would leap from the bed and on the instant shoulder her, and march off down to Hell.

4

Doll finds an Imp in a cellar. It proves unfriendly to her.

On the next day Doll returned to the marsh hut. Again she found Goody Greene seemingly alone, yet the one room was mysteriously filled with a Presence. That day Greene was making teas, infusions, etc. She had four pots on the coals, and was much confined, in her thoughts and in her words, by watching them.

Beside the hut was a cold-cellar dug into the ground, and in this Greene stored her herbs, her drugs, fats, oils, bottles, pans—all the matter for her trade. She wanted organy, dittany, and galingale root. Doll ran quickly to the cellar. She knew where these things were laid.

She opened the door, which was in the shape of a bulkhead, and ran down the short flight of stairs. Here she had played in childhood, and the strong odours of herbs, roots, and meat oils were fragrant to her. So she paused a moment, sniffing about. There was a rattle on a dark shelf behind a clay crock, and a snake skin shook. She thought she had left the familiar behind her in the good woman’s bed, yet she cried out in her horror, calling by mistake to the true God—not to the Satan she had sworn to serve; for there, peeking about the clay crock, was a ball of tawny fur and from out the fur glared a little man’s face. His features were like an Ethiop’s, and his head no bigger than an orange. She noticed, even in the brief moment she paused to look at him, that hands and even nails were perfect. Behind dangled a long ringed tail—a pretty tail of black and dun.

This imp was much offended by her, for it scolded her in strange languages, and its eyes were red with hate. So in terror she, who thought herself brave enough to stand up before Lucifer, fled from the littlest of his servants. This servant she saw again, and the next time without fear.

She ran to Goody Greene, crying she had seen a terrible thing.

‘Hush,’ said Greene; ‘you saw a skull or two, or a snake skin....’

‘No, no, no, it was alive. It was a little imp.’

‘You dreamed it—or it may have been a cat. Cats get into my cellar for the sake of the fats.’

‘It was not a cat.’

But Greene knew it was not an imp.

At the end Doll was cast down because Greene trusted her so little she would not confess the truth, even when she had seen the actual fact of the imp’s body, had heard it chatter. She was distressed, picked up her bonnet and put it on her head. There was much work to do, she said. Mrs. Hannah was plucking geese, and she must be back in time to rub ointment on them where they bled.

‘Doll,’ said Greene, ‘I heard you cry out to God for help when you saw the cat in the cellar.’

‘I forgot myself,’ murmured Doll, and was ashamed that in her extremity she had called upon God and not upon the Foul Fiend she had sworn to worship. She guessed this was the reason both for the imp’s rage and Greene’s mistrust. ‘I will not forget again,’ she said.

Goody Greene assumed an attitude which seemed indeed to the girl one of mock piety. She rolled her eyes and said, ‘Always give thanks where thanks are due.’

Doll thought she was reproving her. ‘I will next time,’ she promised.

Then she went away.

CHAPTER V

1

The night crackles with Fire. Hell laughs and a Witch meets that which she long has sought.

Still in the month of May, catastrophe came to Cowan Corners. On three nights, consecutively, great fires broke out. The first took the noon-house of the Church. The second the ropewalk of Deacon Pentwhistle. The third took the barns, sheds, outhouses of Deacon Ephraim Thumb. This last fire was upon the thirty-first day of May and the morrow would be June.

The farm servants of Widow Bilby came up from the cow-sheds. They called to the window in the attic where Hannah slept (for since the nights were warm she preferred the desolation of an attic to the proximity of her detested companion), ‘Widow Bilby, Widow Bilby, there’s a great fire at our neighbour’s. Shall we not go to help?’ The widow told them to go and do their best, and God go with them. She, too, would follow soon. She got into her clothes, and Doll heard her stamping down the stairs and out of the house. Doll looked from her window and the sky was orange. She clutched her throat, for fire terrified her (because of her parents’ death), yet it fascinated her (because of her unnatural yearning for Hell).

Will she, nill she, the young woman dressed and, much perturbed, she reached the outskirts of the onlookers. With them she could not mingle, for they feared her, and she dreaded this same fear. She withdrew to a big straw stack, and beneath its overhanging top (for the cattle had rubbed against it) she found herself a hiding-place.

Every able man in the village was there, and half of the women. She saw Titus passing buckets and getting out gear, nor could she have looked at him without some slight regret, for he was a goodly, comely man and a young witch has an amorous eye. She heard the shouting, the running about, the snap and rustle of the flames. Sometimes other idle watchers came close to where she hid, and from their talk she learned that these three fires had all been started by a cat breathing fire. Widow Bilby had said that this same cat could be no other than her old tom, Gideon, now dead a three-month, thus maliciously returned from Hell. Doll heard her own name spoken and saw heads shaken. She also heard that Ahab was still within the vehemently burning barn. Because of his ferocity as well as because of his wanderings, he had lately been closely penned. So far no one had been able to loose him, although several had essayed to do so. The horses, savage with fear, had been moved far from the fire lest they, with the fondness of their kind, return to their accustomed stalls and perish. The cattle were running about the barnyard, where they interfered with the work, upsetting buckets, etc. Such swine as the Thumbs possessed burned to their deaths, their stench polluting the air. Doll sickened at the smell, for she never could forget the holocaust of Mont Hoël. Until the fire burst the ridgepole, the doves flew constantly from their cotes under the eaves. Some were so singed they fell to the muck of the yard and, trampled under foot, perished.

Just before the fall of the barn floor, Ahab was loosed. With sparks upon his coat, his eyes rolling most horribly, he came out of danger at a gallop. Seeing the crowd, he charged furiously, passing over the bodies of three, yet not staying to gore them, so intent was he on the men who ran. Wherever he went, the crowd melted and the shouting rose. Many believed it was this wicked bull, and not the Hell cat, that had set these fires, for now he seemed intent on guarding the fire and would let no one near it. Doll thought the creature was her friend—perhaps sometime he would become her familiar; but when she saw him coming for her on a brisk and determined trot she ran up the short ladder leaning against the straw stack, not relying unduly on either charms or friendship.

The same moment the roof fell and sparks flew up, rising into the night air an hundred feet and more, until the sky seemed filled with departing souls flying up and up to the Throne of God.

Doll, panting from her vexatious exercise upon the ladder and sweating from her recent fear, found herself upon the top of the straw stack. She was sprawled upon hands and knees. In the fury of the orange light (which with the fall of the roof suddenly was most horrible) she gazed about her. Then she saw she was not alone, for with her was a luggard fiend who stretched his length upon the straw. His eyes were red as though filled with blood. He wore (she said) a costume like a seaman’s, except that, where a seaman’s clothes are coarse, his were fine and dainty. For instance, the hoops in his ears were not of brass but jewels. She said he had a silk kerchief tied about his head. Upon his breast he bare—as if in mockery of that virgin whose worship the Catholics prefer to the worship of God—the very imp, the little servant, whom she had seen in Greene’s cold-cellar. She guessed he was her god, or a messenger from her god, so, crying out, ‘Master, master, you have come for me,’ she further prostrated herself before him. Now she was no more alone, for this fiend had come for her.

At first the demon made no response; then, after a little and with a few high but kindly words, he permitted her to approach. She said she could scarce believe that, after such long waiting and such unanswered prayers, he had at last come. ‘Oh, I have been lonely, lonely; I have had no one,’ and she sobbed (no tears came).

‘Why do you sob, Bilby’s Doll?’

‘Because I am happy at last.’

He reproved her gently because she had ever doubted his advent, which he said he had announced to her by the lighting of these three great fires. It was his will that turned her steps to the ladder and, as she became too intent upon the fire to notice the summons of his will, he loosed a fierce black bull who urged her up the humble ladder and into his presence.

A mirror for witches

A MIRROR FOR WITCHES

CHAPTER I

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2

3

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CHAPTER II

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6

CHAPTER III

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CHAPTER IV

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CHAPTER V

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