a description of Maulkins’ Tower, the witches’ place of meeting.  It appears that this remote county was full of Popish recusants, travelling priests, and so forth; and some of their spells are given in which the holy names and things alluded to form a strange contrast with the purpose to which they were applied, as to secure a good brewing of ale or the like.  The public imputed to the accused parties a long train of murders, conspiracies, charms, mischances, hellish and damnable practices, “apparent,” says the editor, “on their own examinations and confessions,” and, to speak the truth, visible nowhere else.  Mother Dembdike had the good luck to die before conviction.  Among other tales, we have one of two female devils, called Fancy and Tib.  It is remarkable that some of the unfortunate women endeavoured to transfer the guilt from themselves to others with whom they had old quarrels, which confessions were held good evidence against those who made them, and against the alleged accomplice also.  Several of the unhappy women were found not guilty, to the great displeasure of the ignorant people of the county.  Such was the first edition of the Lancashire witches.  In that which follows the accusation can be more clearly traced to the most villanous conspiracy.

About 1634 a boy called Edmund Robinson, whose father, a very poor man, dwelt in Pendle Forest, the scene of the alleged witching, declared that while gathering bullees (wild plums, perhaps) in one of the glades of the forest, he saw two greyhounds, which he imagined to belong to gentlemen in that neighbourhood.  The boy reported that, seeing nobody following them, he proposed to have a course; but though a hare was started, the dogs refused to run.  On this, young Robinson was about to punish them with a switch, when one Dame Dickenson, a neighbour’s wife, started up instead of the one greyhound; a little boy instead of the other.  The witness averred that Mother Dickenson offered him money to conceal what he had seen, which he refused, saying “Nay, thou art a witch.”  Apparently she was determined he should have full evidence of the truth of what he said, for, like the Magician Queen in the Arabian Tales, she pulled out of her pocket a bridle and shook it over the head of the boy who had so lately represented the other greyhound.  He was directly changed into a horse; Mother Dickenson mounted, and took Robinson before her.  They then rode to a large house or barn called Hourstoun, into which Edmund Robinson entered with others.  He there saw six or seven persons pulling at halters, from which, as they pulled them, meat ready dressed came flying in quantities, together with lumps of butter, porringers of milk, and whatever else might, in the boy’s fancy, complete a rustic feast.  He declared that while engaged in the charm they made such ugly faces and looked so fiendish that he was frightened.  There was more to the same purpose—­as the boy’s having seen one of these hags sitting half-way up