When, under these auspices, the ship was absent on her voyage, a vagabond fellow, named John Stewart, pretending to have knowledge of jugglery, and to possess the power of a spaeman, came to the residence of Tran, the provost, and dropped explicit hints that the ship was lost, and that the good woman of the house was a widow.  The sad truth was afterwards learned on more certain information.  Two of the seamen, after a space of doubt and anxiety, arrived, with the melancholy tidings that the bark, of which John Dein was skipper and Provost Tran part owner, had been wrecked on the coast of England, near Padstow, when all on board had been lost, except the two sailors who brought the notice.  Suspicion of sorcery, in those days easily awakened, was fixed on Margaret Barclay, who had imprecated curses on the ship, and on John Stewart, the juggler, who had seemed to know of the evil fate of the voyage before he could have become acquainted with it by natural means.

Stewart, who was first apprehended, acknowledged that Margaret Barclay, the other suspected person, had applied to him to teach her some magic arts, “in order that she might get gear, kye’s milk, love of man, her heart’s desire on such persons as had done her wrong, and, finally, that she might obtain the fruit of sea and land.”  Stewart declared that he denied to Margaret that he possessed the said arts himself, or had the power of communicating them.  So far was well; but, true or false, he added a string of circumstances, whether voluntarily declared or extracted by torture, which tended to fix the cause of the loss of the bark on Margaret Barclay.  He had come, he said, to this woman’s house in Irvine, shortly after the ship set sail from harbour.  He went to Margaret’s house by night, and found her engaged, with other two women, in making clay figures; one of the figures was made handsome, with fair hair, supposed to represent Provost Tran.  They then proceeded to mould a figure of a ship in clay, and during this labour the devil appeared to the company in the shape of a handsome black lap-dog, such as ladies use to keep.[80] He added that the whole party left the house together, and went into an empty waste-house nearer the seaport, which house he pointed out to the city magistrates.  From this house they went to the sea-side, followed by the black lap-dog aforesaid, and cast in the figures of clay representing the ship and the men; after which the sea raged, roared, and became red like the juice of madder in a dyer’s cauldron.

[Footnote 80:  This may remind the reader of Cazotte’s “Diable Amoureux.”]