Four of the accused only were sent to London, and examined by the king in person.  In the end they were set at liberty, but not from the sagacity of the examiners,—­the boy Robinson having confessed that he was suborned to give false evidence against them.  One of these poor creatures, strange to say, had confessed the crime with which she was charged.  In the Bodl.  Lib.  Dods.  MSS. v.61, p.47, is the confession itself, wherein she gives a circumstantial and minute account of the transactions which took place between her and a familiar whom she calls Mamilian, describing the meetings, feasts, and all the usual routine of witchery and possession.—­(See Whitaker’s Whalley.)

* * * * *

PART FIRST.

The mill went merrily round, and Giles the miller sang and whistled from morning to noon, and from noon till evening, save when the mulcting-dish was about to be embowelled in the best sack; a business too serious for such levity, requiring careful and deliberate thought.

Goody Dickisson, the miller’s wife, was a fat, round, pursy dame, of some forty years’ travel through this wilderness of sorrow, and a decent, honest, sober, and well-conditioned housewife she was; cleanly, thrifty, and had an excellent cheesepress, which the whole neighbourhood could testify.

But the days of man’s happiness are numbered, and woman’s too, as the following narrative will set forth.

The mill had stood, for ages it may be, at the foot of a wild and steep cliff, forming the eastern extremity of the dreary range of Cliviger;[37] an elevated mountainous pass, from whence the waters descend both to the eastern and western seas.  Upon those almost inaccessible crags the rock-eagle and falcon built their nests, unscared by the herdsmen, who in vain attempted their destruction.  Through this pass, the very gorge of the English Apennines, the Calder,[38] a rapid and narrow torrent, brought an unfailing supply of grist to the ever-going hopper of Giles Dickisson.

Not far from this happy abode, in the innermost part of the gorge, where the rocks of Lancashire and Yorkshire frown in close but harmless proximity, at an immense height,—­the road and this narrow cleft only separating their barriers,—­rises a crag of a singular shape, jutting far out from the almost perpendicular strata beneath.  Its form is precisely that of a gigantic helmet, hammered out by the fanciful artist into the likeness of an eagle, its wings partly outstretched, and its beak—­the point of the crag—­overshadowing the grim head of some gaunt warrior.  With but little aid from the imagination, the whole features may be discerned; hence it was denominated, “The Eagle Crag.”  But another appellation, more awful and mysterious, might be attached to it—­a reminiscence of those “deeds without a name,” which have rendered this district of Lancashire so fearfully notorious—­“The witches’ horse-block.”