presently regained its natural colour. Upon which Elizabeth confessed that
it was her familiar, and that she had felt it tickle her poll. She was
condemned, after having inculpated thirteen other persons, but "prevented
execution by dying in gaol, a little before the expiring of the term her
confederate daemon had set for her enjoyment of Diabolical Pleasures."

Alice Duke, "another witch of Styles's Knot," a widow living in
Wincaunton, county of Somerset, was then apprehended and examined. She
seems to have given no trouble, but to have come frankly to the point, and
to have admitted whatever they liked to demand. She said that, eleven or
twelve years ago, Ann Bishop persuaded her to go one night to the
churchyard, and "being come thither to go backward round the church, which
they did three times." In their first round they met a man in black
clothes who accompanied them: in their second a thing like a great black
toad, which leaped up against Duke's apron: in the third, "somewhat in the
shape of a rat" which vanished away. After which they both went home, but
before they went the man in black said something softly to Ann Bishop, yet
what it was Alice did not hear. Soon after this she signed herself away in
the same manner and for the same purposes as Elizabeth Styles had done;
and the devil gave her sixpence as he had given Styles, and vanished away
with the fatal paper. She confirmed all that Styles had said concerning
the meetings on the common, the enchanted pictures and the greenish oil,
the devil, the wine, and cakes, and music; she gave information, though,
of many more such pictures which were to doom the unfortunate likenesses
to death; and she said farther that Ann Bishop was the devil's favourite,
and that she sat next him, and wore "a green Apron, a French Waistcoat,
and a red Petticoat." She gave the same phrase that Elizabeth Styles had
given, as the magic password which took them to and from the devil's
meetings; and she confessed that her familiar came to her each night,
about seven o'clock, "in the shape of a little Cat of a dunnish colour,
which is as smooth as a Want, and when she is suck'd she is in a kind of
Trance." She had hurt several people; specially Thomas Hanway's daughter
by giving her a pewter dish for a "good handsel" in the time of her lying
in. This pewter dish was of such a malicious and venefical nature that
when Thomas Hanway's daughter used it to heat some deer suet and rose
water f