fice to her his only
son, and gave him an apple for this boy to eat, who, on tasting it,
fell down dead. The father and mother, in despair at this fatal and to
both unexpected accident, uttered lamentations, and were inconsolable.

Abrahel appeared again to the goatherd, and promised to restore the
child to life if the father would ask this favor of him by paying him
the kind of adoration due only to God. The peasant knelt down,
worshiped Abrahel, and immediately the boy began to revive. He opened
his eyes; they warmed him, chafed his limbs, and at last he began to
walk and to speak. He was the same as before, only thinner, paler, and
more languid; his eyes heavy and sunken, his movements slower and less
free, his mind duller and more stupid. At the end of a year, the demon
that had animated him quitted him with a great noise; the youth fell
backwards, and his body, which was foetid and stunk insupportably, was
dragged with a hook out of his father's house, and buried in a field
without any ceremony.

This event was reported at Nancy, and examined into by the
magistrates, who informed themselves exactly of the circumstance,
heard the witnesses, and found that the thing was such as has been
related. For the rest, the story does not say how the peasant was
punished, nor whether he was so at all. Perhaps his crime with the
demon could not be proved; to that there was probably no witness. In
regard to the death of his son, it was difficult to prove that he was
the cause of it.

Procopius, in his secret history of the Emperor Justinian, seriously
asserts that he is persuaded, as well as several other persons, that
that emperor was a demon incarnate. He says the same thing of the
Empress Theodora his wife. Josephus, the Jewish historian, says that
the souls of the wicked enter the bodies of the possessed, whom they
torment, and cause to act and speak.

We see by St. Chrysostom that in his time many Christians believed
that the spirits of persons who died a violent death were changed into
demons, and that the magicians made use of the spirit of a child they
had killed for their magical operations, and to discover the future.
St. Philastrius places among heretics those persons who believed that
the souls of worthless men were changed into demons.

According to the system of these authors, the demon might have entered
into the body of the child of the shepherd Pierron, moved it and
maintained it in a kind of life whilst hi