rst nothing; but if any were so impious as to have given no alms,
they say, when the souls of such do depart, they sleep in an inactive
state till they resume the terrestrial bodies again; others, that what
the low-country Scotch call a wraith, and the Irish _taibhse_, or death's
messenger (appearing sometimes as a little rough dog, and if crossed and
conjured in time, will be pacified by the death of any other creature
instead of the sick man), is only exuvious fumes of the man approaching
death, exhaled and congealed into a various likeness (as ships and armies
are sometimes shaped in the air), and called astral bodies, agitated as
wild-fire with wind, and are neither souls nor counterfeiting spirits;
yet not a few avouch (as is said) that surely these are a numerous people
by themselves, having their own politics, which diversities of judgment
may occasion several inconsonancies in this rehearsal, after the
narrowest scrutiny made about it.

Their weapons are most-what solid earthly bodies, nothing of iron, but
much of stone, like to yellow soft flint spa, shaped like a barbed
arrowhead, but flung like a dart, with great force. These arms (cut by
art and tools, it seems, beyond human) have somewhat of the nature of
thunderbolt subtlety, and mortally wounding the vital parts without
breaking the skin; of which wounds I have observed in beasts, and felt
them with my hands. They are not as infallible Benjamites, hitting at a
hair's-breadth; nor are they wholly unvanquishable, at least in
appearance.

The men of the second sight do not discover strange things when asked,
but at fits and raptures, as if inspired with some genius at that
instant, which before did work in or about them. Thus I have frequently
spoken to one of them, who in his transport told me he cut the body of
one of those people in two with his iron weapon, and so escaped this
onset, yet he saw nothing left behind of that appearing divided; at other
times he outwrested [wrestled?] some of them. His neighbours often
perceived this man to disappear at a certain place, and about an hour
after to become visible, and discover himself near a bow-shot from the
first place. It was in that place where he became invisible, said he,
that the subterraneans did encounter and combat with him. Those who are
_unseund_, or unsanctified (called fey), are said to be pierced or
wounded with those people's weapons, which makes them do somewhat very
unlike their former