of which, at this distance of time, it is scarcely possible satisfactorily to examine.  With such a witness, however, as Jennet Device, and such an admirable engine as the meeting at Malking-Tower, the guests at which she could multiply ad libitum, doling out the plaat, as Titus Oates would call it, by such instalments, and in such fragmentary portions, as would conduce to an easy digestion of the whole, the wonder seems not to be, that one unfortunate victim of a higher class should have perished in the meshes of artful and complicated villainy, but that its ramifications were not more extensive, and still more fatal and destructive.  From one so capable of taking a hint as the little precocious prodigy of wickedness, in whose examination, Potts tells us, “Mr. Nowell took such great paines,” a very summary deliverance might be expected from troublesome neighbours, or still more troublesome relatives; and if, by a leading question, she could only be induced to marshal them in their allotted places at the witches’ imaginary banquet, there was little doubt of their taking their station at a place of meeting where the sad realities of life were only to be encountered, “the common place of execution near to Lancaster.”

[Footnote 38:  The explorer of Pendle will find the mansion of Alice Nutter, Rough Lee, still standing.  It is impossible to look at it, recollecting the circumstances of her case, without being strongly interested.  It is a very substantial, and rather a fine specimen of the houses of the inferior gentry in the time of James the first, and is now divided into cottages.  On one of the side walls is an inscription, almost entirely obliterated, which contained the date of the building and the initials of the name of its first owner.  At a little distance from Rough Lee, pursuing the course of the stream, he will find the foundations of an ancient mill, and the millstones still unremoved, though the building itself has been pulled down long ago.  This was, doubtless, the mill of Richard Baldwin, the miller, who, as stated in Old Demdike’s confession, ejected her and Alizon Device her daughter, from his land so contumeliously; immediately after which her “Spirit or divell called Tibb appeared, and sayd Revenge thee of him.”  Greenhead, the residence of Robert Nutter, one of the reputed victims of the prisoners tried on this occasion, is at some distance from Rough Lee, and is yet in good preservation, and occupied as a farmhouse.]

[Footnote 39:  The instances are very few in England in which the statute of James the first was brought to bear against any but the lowest classes of the people.  Indeed, there are not many attempts reported to attack the rich and powerful with weapons derived from its provisions.  One of such attempts, which did not, like that against Alice Nutter, prove successful, is narrated in a curious and scarce pamphlet, which I have now before me, with this title—­“Wonderful News from the North, or a true Relation of the sad