vens, only a few years ago, you harbored at your house a
wizard," said Louder.

Charles Stevens was half amused and half indignant. He began to
expostulate with Louder, when the latter said:

"Nay, nay; I charge you not with bartering with the devil; but list to
me. On the selfsame day you found the stranger wounded at the road-side
near the spring, we three had been hunting among the hills for deer.
Some one had bewitched my gun. I know it, for when I fired, the bullet,
which never failed on other occasions to go straight to the mark, went
astray. All day long that mysterious stranger had followed us,
grievously tormenting us and leading astray our shots, until I loaded my
piece with a sixpence and fired at a large fat buck which strutted
temptingly before me. Had you probed his wound I trow you would have
found my sixpence buried in his side."

At this, the negro, who was crouched in a corner, groaned in agony,
while Charles was inclined to treat the matter lightly. Louder related
how, while at the lake in the wood, he had been visited by this
mysterious apparition, who offered him a book to sign, adding that he
knew at once that his tormentor was a wizard or the Devil, that his eyes
were in an instant changed to fire, and sulphurous smoke issued from his
nostrils.

"Can you ask me if I believe my own eyes and my own ears?" concluded
Louder. "Those are truths, and had I signed his book, I would have been
tormented by fiends and my soul forever lost."

"They do say the people are ready to cry out on Goody Nurse," put in
Bly.

"Goody Nurse! surely not," answered Charles. "She is one of the best
women I know. She is kind, good and gentle with all."

"Verily, so is Satan, until he has his clutches upon you. Goody Nurse is
a witch."

"Beware, John Louder, how you malign such as she," said Charles, growing
serious. "Have the proof before you assert."

"I know whereof I speak," declared John Louder. "About five or six
months ago, one morning about sunrise, I was in my chamber assaulted by
the shape of Goody Nurse, which looked on me, grinned at me, and very
much hurt me with a blow on the side of my head. That selfsame day,
about noon, the same shape walked in the room where I was, and an apple
strangely flew out of my hand, into the lap of my wife, six or eight
feet from me. Can you deny such evidences as this?"

"I have seen her," put in John Bly, "and once when her shape did assail
me, I struck at her with my