“Should you like,” said he, “to hear of one or two, yes, or a great many of her performances?  Why, to make not only her fellow-countrymen, but the Indians, the Ethiopians, or even the Antipodeans, love her to distraction, are only the easy lessons of her art, as it were, and mere trifles.  Listen to what she has done before many witnesses.  By a single word she changed a lover into a beaver, because he had gone to another flame.  She changed an innkeeper, a neighbor of hers she was envious of, into a frog; and now the old fellow, swimming about in a cask of his own wine, or buried in the dregs, croaks hoarsely to his old customers,—­quite in the way of business.  She changed another person, a lawyer from the Forum, into a ram, because he had conducted a suit against her; to this very day that ram is always butting about.  Finally, however, public indignation was aroused by so many people coming to harm through her arts; and the very next day had been fixed upon to wreak a fearful vengeance on her, by stoning her to death.  She frustrated the design by her enchantments.  You remember how Medea, having got Creon to allow her just one day before her departure, burned his whole palace, with himself and his daughter in it, by means of flames issuing from a garland?  Well, this sorceress, having performed certain deadly incantations in a ditch (she told me so herself in a drunken fit), confined everybody in the town each in his own house for two whole days, by a secret spell of the demons.  The bars could not be wrenched off, nor the doors taken off the hinges, nor even a breach made in the walls.  At last, by common consent, the people all swore they would not lift a hand against her, and would come to her defense if any one else did.  She then liberated the whole city.  But in the middle of the night she conveyed the author of the conspiracy, with all his house, close barred as it was,—­the walls, the very ground, and even the foundations,—­to another city a hundred miles off, on the top of a craggy mountain, and so without water.  And as the houses of the inhabitants were built so close together that there was not room for the new-comer, she threw down the house before the gate of the city and took her departure.”

“You narrate marvelous things,” said I, “my good Socrates; and no less terrible than marvelous.  In fact, you have excited no small anxiety (indeed I may say fear) in me too; not a mere grain of apprehension, but a piercing dread for fear this old hag should come to know our conversation in the same way, by the help of some demon.  Let us get to bed without delay; and when we have rested ourselves by a little sleep, let us fly as far as we possibly can before daylight.”

While I was still advising him thus, the worthy Socrates, overcome by more wine than he was used to and by his fatigue, had fallen asleep and was snoring loudly.  I shut the door, drew the bolts, and placing my bed close against the hinges, tossed it up well and lay down on it.  I lay awake some time through fear, but closed my eyes at last a little before midnight.