of these events, and offered up devout prayers to be
preserved from the machinations of the Evil One. The note of fear being
once sounded, the visiters, as is generally the case in all tales of
wonder, strove with each other who should witness the most
extraordinary occurrences; and within a week, it was generally believed
in the parishes of Banchory-Ternan, Drumoak, Durris, Kincardine-O'Neil,
and all the circumjacent districts of Mearns and Aberdeenshire, that
the devil had been seen in the act of hammering upon the house-top of
Baldarroch. One old man asserted positively that, one night, after
having been to see the strange gambols of the knives and mustard-pots,
he met the phantom of a great black man, "who wheeled round his head
with a whizzing noise, making a wind about his ears that almost blew
his bonnet off," and that he was haunted by him in this manner for
three miles. It was also affirmed and believed, that all horses and
dogs that approached this enchanted ground, were immediately
affected--that a gentleman, slow of faith, had been cured of his
incredulity by meeting the butter-churn jumping in at the door as he
himself was going out--that the roofs of houses had been torn off, and
that several ricks in the corn-yard had danced a quadrille together, to
the sound of the devil's bagpipes re-echoing from the mountain-tops.
The women in the family of the persecuted farmer of Baldarroch also
kept their tongues in perpetual motion; swelling with their strange
stories the tide of popular wonder. The good wife herself, and all her
servants, said that, whenever they went to bed, they were attacked with
stones and other missiles, some of which came below the blankets and
gently tapped their toes. One evening, a shoe suddenly darted across a
garret where some labourers were sitting, and one of the men, who
attempted to catch it, swore positively that it was so hot and heavy he
was unable to hold it. It was also said that the bearbeater (a sort of
mortar used to bruise barley in)--an object of such weight that it
requires several men to move it--spontaneously left the barn and flew
over the house-top, alighting at the feet of one of the servant maids,
and hitting her, but without hurting her in the least, or even causing
her any alarm; it being a fact well known to her, that all objects thus
thrown about by the devil lost their specific gravity, and could harm
nobody, even though they fell upon a person's head.

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