--John for love often, the little wenches in jest, to Margaret Hardman
"promising a thraue of kisses," "wrestling with Johan Smyth, a maid, to
kiss her"--he had given the devil in rich proportion all through the
Starkies' house, and only Mr. Darrel could exorcise him. The possessed
leaped about like goats, and crawled on all fours like beasts, and barked
like dogs, and had communications from a white dove, and saw horned devils
under the beds, and had visions of big black dogs with monstrous tails and
bound with chains, and huge black cats and big mice that knocked them down
at a blow, and left them speechless, cold, and dead. And then they took to
"slossinge up their meat like greedy dogges or hogges," and they made the
same noises as a broken-winded horse; and they howled and shrieked; and
one of them, Jane Ashton the servant aged thirty, fell foul of Edmund
Hartley for all his kisses and promises of marriage; and they "yelled and
whupped;" and there was in very truth the devil to pay in that horrible
house when Mr. More and Mr. Darrel went to exorcise the fiends and restore
the possessed to their senses. After some days of prayer, and of fighting
with the devil who would cry out when Mr. Darrel was preaching, "Bible
bable, he will never have done prating, prittle prattle;" and "I must goe,
I must away; I cannot tarrie; whither shall I goe? I am hot, I am too hot,
I will not dye!" and such like, six of them were delivered, and visibly
and bodily dispossessed. With one, Mary Byron, the devil came up from her
stomach to her breast, then to her throat, when it gave her "a sore lug,"
whilst a mist dazzled her eyes. Then she felt it go out of her mouth,
leaving behind it a sore throat and a filthy smell, and it was in the
likeness of a crow's head, and it sat in a corner of the parlour in the
dark; but suddenly flashing out all a fire it flew out of the window, and
the whole place was in a blaze, according to her imagination. John Starkie
lost his in the shape of a man with a humpback and very ill-favoured, who,
when he had gone out wished much to re-enter, but Master John withstood
him, and had the best of it. He was like a "foule ugly man with a white
beard and a 'bulch' on his back." The same tale had little Ellin Holland
and Anne Starkie to tell, all save the white beard. Elinor Hardman lost
hers as an urchin, but presently returning through a little hole in the
parlour, he offered her gold and silver in any quantity if sh