n honest little hen that had to lay
good eggs some day, and be eaten at table when her work was done.

THE NEWCASTLE PRICKERS.

Hopkins was not the only one of his trade in England, for Ralph Gardner,
in his "England's Grievance Discovered" (1655), speaks of two prickers,
Thomas Shovel and Cuthbert Nicholson, who, in 1649 and 1650, were sent by
the Newcastle magistrates into Scotland, there to confer with a very able
man in that line, and bring him back to Newcastle. They were to have
twenty shillings, but the Scotchman three pounds, per head of all they
could convict, and a free passage there and back. When these wretches got
to any town--for they tried all the chief market towns of the
district--the crier used to go round with his bell, desiring "all people
that would bring in any complaint against any woman for a witch, they
should be sent for and tryed by the person appointed." As many as thirty
women were brought at once into the Newcastle town-hall, stript, pricked,
and twenty-seven set aside as guilty. This said witch-finder told
Lieut.-Colonel Hobson that "he knew women, whether they were witches or
no, by their looks; and when the said person was searching of a personable
and good-like woman, the said Colonel replyed and said, Surely this woman
is none, and need not be tried; but the Scotchman said she was, for all
the Town said she was, and therefore he would try her: and presently, in
sight of all the people, laid her body naked to the Waste, with her
cloaths over her head, by which Fright and Shame all her bloud contracted
into one part of her body, and then he ran a Pin into her Thigh, and then
suddenly let her Coats fall, and then demanded whether she had nothing of
his in her body, but did not bleed, but she, being amazed, replied little,
and then he put his hand up her coats and pulled out the pin and set her
aside as a guilty person and child of the Devil, and fell to try others,
whom he made guilty. Lieut.-Colonel Hobson, perceiving the alteration of
the foresaid woman by her blood settling in her right parts, caused that
woman to be brought again, and her cloaths pulled up to her Thigh, and
required the Scot to run the pin in the same place, and then it gushed out
of blood, and the said Scot cleared her, and said she was not a child of
the Devil."

If this Scotch witch-finder had not been stopped he would have found half
the women in the north country witches; at last Henry Ogle got hold of
him, a