“Here the Devil feasted them with various compounds and confections; and, having feasted to their heart’s content, they danced and then fought. The Devil made them ride on spits, from which they were thrown; and the Devil beat them with the spits and laughed at them. He then caused them to build a house to protect them against the day of judgment, and presently overturned the walls of the house, and derided them again. All sorts of obscenities were reported to follow upon these scenes. The Devil begot on the witches sons and daughters; this new generation intermarried again, and the issue of this further conjunction appears to have been toads and serpents. How all this pedigree proceeded, in the two or three years in which Blockula had never been heard of, I know not that the witches were ever called on to explain. But what was most of all to be deplored, the Devil was not content with seducing the witches to go and celebrate this infernal Sabbath; he further insisted that they should bring the children of Mohra along with them. “At first, he was satisfied, if each witch brought one: but now, he demanded that each witch should bring six or seven for her quota. How the witches managed with the minds of the children, we are at a loss to guess. These poor, harmless innocents, steeped to the very lips in ignorance and superstition, were, by some means, kept in continual alarm by the wicked, or, to speak more truly, the insane old women, and said as their prompters said. It does not appear that the children ever left their beds, at the time they reported they had been to Blockula. Their parents watched them with fearful anxiety. At a certain time of the night, the children were seized with a strange shuddering; their limbs were agitated, and their skins covered with a profuse perspiration. When they came to themselves, they related that they had been to Blockula, and the strange things they had seen, similar to what had already been described by the women. Three hundred children, of various ages, are said to have been seized with this epidemic.