“Away went the Quaker--away went the Baker, Away went the Friar--that fine fat Ghost, Whose marrow Old Nick Had intended to pick Dressed like a Woodcock, and served on toast! “Away went the nice little Cardinal’s Niece And the pretty Grisettes, and the Dons from Spain, And the Corsair’s crew, And the coin-cliping Jew, And they scamper’d, like lamplighters, over the plain!” The Witches’ Sabbath is the annual reunion of Satan and his worshippers on earth. The witches, mounted on goats and broomsticks, flock to desolate heaths and hills to hold high revel with their devil. Beelzebub swears in this story by the horns of his grandfather. While the devil is known to have a grandmother, there has never been found a trace of his grandfather. Satan has probably been adopted by the grandmother of Grendel, the Anglo-Saxon evil demon. The horns have been inherited by Satan from Dionysos. This Greek god had bull-feet and bull’s horns. The reader, who is interested in the origin of the European Carnival (Shrove Tuesday) customs, is referred to the editor’s monograph _The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy_ (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1920). THE LEGEND OF MONT ST.-MICHEL BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT No greater proof of the permanence and persistence of the devil as a character in literature can be adduced than the fact that this writer, in whom we find the purest expression of Naturalism, for whom the visible world was absolutely all that there is, was attracted by a devil-legend. But on this point he had a good example in his god-father and master Gustave Flaubert, who, though a realist of realists, showed deep interest in the Tempter of St. Anthony. This legend of the fraudulent bargain between a sprite and a farmer as to alternate upper- and under-ground crops, with which “the great vision of the guarded mount” is here connected, is of Northern origin, but has travelled South as far as Arabia. It will be found in Grimm’s _Fairy Tales_ (No. 189); Thiele’s _Danish Legends_ (No. 122), and T. Sternberg’s _The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northampshire_ (p. 140). Rabelais used it as a French legend, and in its Oriental form it served as a subject for a poem by the German Friedrich Rückert (“Der betrogene Teufel”). In all these versions the agreement is entered into between the devil (in the Northampshire form it is a bogie or some other field spirit) and a peasant. It was reserved for Maupassant to make St. Michael get the better of Satan on earth as in heaven.