“Within a gloomy dimble she doth dwell, Down in a pit o’ergrown with brakes and briars, Close by the ruins of a shaken abbey, Torn with an earthquake down into the ground, ’Mongst graves and grots, near an old charnel-house Where you shall find her sitting in her form, As fearful and melancholie as that She is about: with caterpillars’ kells, And knotty cobwebs, rounded in with spells. Thence she steals forth to relief in the fogs, And rotten mists, upon the fens and bogs, Down to the drowned lands of Lincolnshire: To make ewes cast their lambs, swine eat their farrow, The housewives’ tun not work, nor the milk churn! Writhe children’s wrists, and suck their breath in sleep: Get vials of their blood! and where the sea Casts up his slimy ooze, search for a weed To open locks with, and to rivet charms, Planted about her in the wicked feat Of all her mischiefs, which are manifold.” We may illustrate this belief by the case of Joan Cason or Freeman (she was the wife of one Freeman). She was indicted and solemnly tried by a jury on the charge of being a witch, and of having killed by witchcraft one Jane Cooke, aged three years. The principal evidence was Sarah Cooke, mother of the child. She kept an alehouse. She was one day drawing a pot of ale for a stranger when he remarked the languishing condition of her child, and suggested that it was bewitched. “Take,” he said, “a tile from the house of the suspected person, lay it in the fire, and if she really is a witch the tile will sparkle round the cradle.” Wonderful to relate, Sarah Cooke took a tile from the woman’s house, laid it in the fire, and it did “sparkle round the house.” At that moment Joan Cason herself looked in, gazed upon the child, and went away. Four hours after the child died. What more was wanted? There was evidence corroborative. In the lifetime of the man Freeman there was something like a rat seen about her house, something that squeaked. In the end Joan was hanged, protesting her innocence, but confessing ill conduct with one Mason, who had died of the plague.