to her--sometimes as a mist; sometimes
as a ball of fire, with dispersed spangles of black; but chiefly as a
black man; and sometimes as a horned man, in which shape he came to her
when in prison. Mary was a good hand at banning. She cursed John Orkton,
and wished his fingers might rot off, and they did so; she cursed
Elizabeth Hancock, whom she accused of stealing her hen, wishing that the
bones might stick in her throat, calling her a "prowde linny, prowde
flurts, and shaking the hand bade her go in, for she should repent it;"
and incontinently Elizabeth Hancock was taken with a pinching at the
heart, and sudden weakness of all her body, and fainting fits, and racking
pains, and madness, and raving, so that she tore the hair off her head as
she tossed about distracted. Her father went to a wise man, who showed him
Mary Smith's face in a glass, and bade him make a cake according to
certain directions, which then he was to lay, half on Bessie's head and
half on her back, and which would infallibly cure her, as she was not ill
but bewitched. The father did so, and the daughter mended. Soon after
this she married one James Scot, who, having a mortal hatred against Mary
Smith, killed her cat, and threatened that if his wife had any such fits
as she had before they married, he would hang Mary Smith without mercy. At
this Mary clapped her hands, and cried "They had killed her cat!" and the
next day Elizabeth had the old nipping round her heart. So James went to
Mary and said he would most certainly take her before the magistrates, if
she did not amend her ways and heal his wife at once. Fortunately for Mary
the woman got better, and the evil day was staved off for a time. To
Cecily Balye, the maid-servant next door, she sent her cat to sit upon her
breast when she slept, in revenge at the maid's sweeping a little dust
awry; and Cicely gave awful evidence how, through the thin partition which
divided them, she used to see Mary Smith adoring her imp in a submissive
manner--down on her knees, using strange gestures and uttering many
murmuring and broken speeches; and if she had listened, and looked more
attentively, she might have seen and heard more: "but she was with the
present spectacle so affrighted, that she hurried away in much feare and
distemper."

"The fourth endammaged by this Hagge," says Roberts, was one Edmund
Newton. He was a cheesemonger, like herself, and she thought he got the
best of the trade; so she, or her