troubled him less at night when he
took a good "nightcap," which made him sleep soundly. He found that the
Devil could not stand music, being a sad and sombre personage; just as,
long before, music was found a sovereign recipe for the melancholia of
King Saul. But the surest specific was railing and derision. When Luther
called him names, or laughed at him, the Devil vanished in a huff.
Brother Martin was plain-spoken at the best of times, but on these
occasions he was too-downright for quotation. Michelet gives a choice
sample; but though the French language allows more licence than ours,
he is obliged to give but the first letter of one of Luther's vigorous
substantives. Brother Martin displayed a sly humor in one of his stories
about Satan. A possessed person was taken into a monastery, and
the devil in him said to the monks, "O my people, what have I
done?"--"_Popule meus, quid feci tibi?_"

According to Luther, fair and foul winds were caused by good and evil
spirits. He spoke of a terrible lake in Switzerland, haunted by the
Devil, and said there was a similar one in his own country. If a stone
was thrown into it, a frightful storm shook the whole locality. The
Devil made people idiots, cripples, blind, deaf and dumb; and Luther
declared that the doctors who treated such infirmities as natural had
a great deal to learn in demonology. One or two of his stories of
possession are extremely gruesome. With his own lusty love of life,
Luther could not understand suicide, so he attributed that also to the
Devil. Satan made the suicides think they were doing something else;
even praying, and thus he killed them. Brother Martin, indeed, sometimes
feared the Devil would twist his neck or press his skull into his
brains. Nor did he shrink from the darkest developments of this
superstition. He held that the Devil could assume the form of a man or
a woman, cohabit with human beings of the opposite sex, and become a
father or a mother. "Eight years ago," said Luther, "I saw and touched
myself at Dessau a child who had no parents, and was born of the Devil.
He was twelve years old, and shaped like an ordinary child. He did
nothing but eat, and ate as much as three peasants or threshers. When he
was touched he cried out like one possessed; if any unfortunate accident
happened in the house, he rejoiced and laughed; if, on the contrary, all
went well, he wept continually. I said to the princes of Anhalt, with
whom I then was: If I