they ripen, will the stormy autumn wrap its mantle of mist and rain so closely about them, that they cannot be housed before they have sprouted, or have spoiled? The cold, bitter damp benumbs the strength of the feeble. Appetite and health fail; a fear creeps into the life. Fate seems to have dragged the sufferer into a vault of gloom, to whisper foreboding and inspire dread. These traditions of mischief wrought by malignant men inheriting the wicked craft and vindictive spite of the sorcerers, are uttered at the fireside, or if not so uttered, are brooded upon by a disturbed fancy.[116] SUPERSTITIOUS FEARS AND CRUELTIES. John Webster, the great exposer of shams and denouncer of superstitions in his day, and author of the "_Discovery of pretended Witchcraft_," speaking of a clear head and sound judgment as necessary to competent witnesses, says:--"They ought to be of a sound judgment, and not of a vitiated and distempered phantasy, nor of a melancholic constitution; for these will take a bush to be a bugbear, and a black sheep to be a demon; the noise of the wild swans flying high in the night, to be spirits; or, as they call them here in the north, 'Gabriel Ratchets;' the calling of a daker hen in the meadow, to be the Whistlers; the howlings of the female fox in a gill or clough for the male, to be the cry of fairies." The Gabriel Ratchets seem to be the same with the German Rachtvogel or Rachtraven. The word and the superstition are still known in Lancashire, though in a sense somewhat different; for the Gabriel Ratchets are supposed to be something like litters of puppies yelping in the air. Ratch is certainly a name for a dog in general (see _Junius, in voce_). The whistlers are supposed to be the green or whistling plovers, which fly very high in the night, uttering their characteristic note. Speaking of the practices of witch-finders, Webster says:--"By such wicked means and unchristian practices, divers innocent persons have lost their lives; and these wicked rogues wanted not greater persons (even of the ministry too) that did authorize and encourage them in their diabolical courses. And the like in my time happened here in Lancashire, where divers, both men and women, were accused of supposed witchcraft, and were so unchristianly and inhumanly handled, as to be stripped stark naked and laid upon tables and beds to be searched for their supposed witch-marks; so barbarous and cruel acts doth diabolical instigation, working upon ignorance and superstition, produce."[117] SUPERSTITIOUS BELIEFS IN MANCHESTER IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.