the Subtle One
himself.

I should have liked to see face to face this wonderful specimen of a
judge, and the people who were brought before him. The creatures that
God might bring together from two different worlds would not be more
unlike, more strange to each other, more utterly wanting in a common
language. The old hag, a skeleton in tatters, with an eye flashing
forth evil things, a being thrice cooked in hell-fire; and the
ill-looking hermit shepherd of the Black Forest or the upper Alpine
wastes--such are the savages offered to the leaden gaze of a
scholarling, to the judgement of a schoolman.

Not long will they let him toil in his judgment-seat. They will tell
all without being tortured. Come the torture will indeed, but
afterwards, by way of complement and crown to the law-procedure. They
explain and relate to order whatever they have done. The Devil is the
Witch's bedfellow, the shepherd's intimate friend. She, for her part,
smiles triumphantly, feels a manifest joy in the horror of those
around.

Truly, the old woman is very mad, and equally so the shepherd. Are
they foolish? Not at all, but far otherwise. They are refined, subtle,
skilled in growing herbs, and seeing through walls. Still more clearly
do they see those monumental ass's ears that overshadow the doctor's
cap. Clearest of all is the fear he has of them, for in vain does he
try to bear him boldly; he does nought but tremble. He himself owns
that, if the priest who adjures the demon does not take care, the
Devil will change his lodging only to pass into the priest himself,
feeling all the more proud of dwelling in a body dedicated to God. Who
knows but these simple Devils of Witches and shepherds might even
aspire to inhabit an inquisitor? He is far from easy in mind when in
his loudest voice he says to the old woman, "If your master is so
mighty, why do I not feel his blows?"

"And, indeed I felt them but too strongly," says the poor man in his
book. "When I was in Ratisbon, how often he would come knocking at my
windowpanes! How often he stuck pins in my cap! A hundred visions too
did I have of dogs, monkeys," &c.

* * * * *

The dearest delight of that great logician, the Devil, is, by the
mouth of the seeming old woman, to push the doctor with awkward
arguments, with crafty questions, from which he can only escape by
acting like the fish who saves himself by troubling the water and
turning it black as i