ordered it to come into his hand; it did so : he threw it away, and it returned to him; this jugglery being continued until Mompesson desired his servant not to have such intimate communion with the Devil. It was, however, repeated at least ten times, in the presence of several people, who also testified that they were certain that the drummer could not be far off, for that there was a most villanous smell of brimstone. "What do you say to that?" quoth Dr. Bräuner, "after a fervent prayer to be delivered from such fearful assaults of the Devil." "Why Dr. Bräuner," we reply, "the Cock-lane ghost beats it hollow, to say nothing of the clever servant-maid, who set all her mistress's crockery dancing like mad,' by means of horse hairs, at Stockwell, in the county of Surrey; or the good Devil of Woodstock." We can only afford to give a brief analysis of these two stories. The first occurred on Monday and Tuesday, the 6th and 7th of January, 1772, to a Mrs. Golding, who, about noon on the first of these days, heard her crockery go smash in the back kitchen; and her maid, coming into the room, told her that it was all falling off the shelf. On her going into .the kitchen she saw another row fall down and break, and several other articles followed the example without any visible cause: in short, hams, cheeses, everything was in motion; and the Stockwell ghost made more noises than the Cock-lane one. Some years afterwards, the servant, Ann Robinson, confessed that she had been the author of all the mischief. She had fastened horsehairs to some plates, which she pulled; and others she threw down dexterously when not observed: she had put the hooks through the skin only of the hams, &c., so that the hold presently gave way; and, by putting a chemical powder into pans of water, had made the latter appear to boil. The pranks of the good Devil of Woodstock lasted longer, viz., from October 16th, to November 1st, 1649, and were played off on the commissioners who came down to survey that manor. They consisted chiefly in the extinction of the candles, with a sulphurious smell; throwing billets of wood about; violently lifting up the beds, &c. The true secret came out some years afterwards: this good Devil of Woodstock being a person named Joseph Collins, commonly called "Funny Jos.," who had hired himself as a servant to the commissioners, and VOL. II C carried on his tricks with the aid of two others, who were confederate with him. The candles were blown out, by gunpowder having been introduced into the wick. CHAPTER XXV. "The times have been, That when the brains were out, the thing would die, And there an end." MACBETH, Act iii., Scene 4. MACBETH."I bear a charmed life, which must not yield MAID." Despair thy charm." IBID., Act v., Scene 7. OF A CHARMED LIFE. We have never been so hard put to it as we have been to give an equivalent translation of the comprehensive German title of this chapter, "Vom Vestmachung." "Invulnerability" won't answer, for it is something more; it secures you not only from gunshot wounds and sabre cuts, but also from the hangman. Once get the recipe, and you may be strung up at eight o'clock in the morning, and you will continue your gambols on the gallows till sunset, and be as lively as you were when you started; whilst the sheriff, who is superintending, what was intended for, "a judicial murder," (as some lachrymose editors, who hold out for the abolition of all capital punishments, would term it,) has either fainted away with hunger at the foot of it, or been floored by a coup de soleil. We always lay it down as a rule, that a man who so earnestly contends for the abolition of Jack Ketch's office, has some undivulged crime on his conscience, which, ever and anon, produces a spasmodic contraction of the thorax, to be surely followed, in the stage of convalescence, by an editorial against hanging. But vestmachung ensures you against drowning as well as hanging; against railway accidents as well as bullets; against the blowing up of steam-boats as |