h she gave privately to Mrs. Throckmorton
together with the old dame's hairlace; bidding her burn them. The old
woman turning against the Lady, said, half sorrowfully, "Madam, why do you
use me thus? I never did you any harm as yet:" words to be remembered and
treasured up against her, when the hour came. That very night Lady
Cromwell had bad dreams concerning Mother Samuel and her cat, which she
said came to strip all the flesh from her--and awakened, crying mightily
and much distressed. From that time she had fits, and continued very
hardly holden till her dying day, which was one year and a quarter after
the visit to Warbois. So Mother Samuel's words were held to have been
witch's threats, and the whole country was convinced that Lady Cromwell
had died by her magic arts, and bewitched. As she was, poor lady, with
nervous fear and superstition and ignorance.

The next year, in the winter of 1591, Mr. Henry Pickering, a young student
at Cambridge, tried to make Dame Samuel confess, but she would not suffer
him or his companions to speak, and when they desired her to speak
softlier, answered: "She was born in a Mill, begot in a Kiln, and must
have her Will, and could speak no softlier." Then Mr. Henry began to
question her on her faith, but got only tart answers; so, losing patience,
he said that if she did not repent and confess to having worked that
wickedness on the children, he hoped one day to see her burn at the stake,
and that he would bring wood and faggots and the children should blow the
coals. To which old Dame Samuel replied that she "would rather see him
doused over head in the pond;" and so went away home, to be beaten for
gossiping and staying late, by that terrible old Turk of hers.

And now the children would be well only when the dame was with them; so
the parents sought to engage her to live with them, but the old Turk would
not give his consent, and beat her severely with a cudgel on the slightest
pretext. The whole thing angered him, and his dame could not do right let
her do what she would. However, he was prevailed on to spare her for eight
or nine days, during which time the lying little girls professed
themselves cured of all their haunting spirits--dun chickens, naked babes,
and the like; to the old woman's extreme consternation and passionate
assurances of innocence. Then the children turned against Agnes Samuel,
the daughter, declaring that she had bewitched them equally with the
mother: wher