The encounter with the great black dog in the Wartburg is related in an old edition of Luther’s Table-Talk with a curious addition, which tells how Luther, on one occasion, calmly lifted from the bed the dog, which had frequently tormented him, carried him to the window, and threw him out without the animal even barking. Luther had not been able to learn anything about it afterwards from others, but no such dog was kept in the Castle.[386] Of the strange din by which the devil annoyed him within those walls Luther speaks more in detail in the German Table-Talk. “When I was living in Patmos … I had a sack of hazel nuts shut up in a box. On going to bed at night I undressed in my study, put out the light, went to my bedchamber and got into bed. Then the nuts began to rattle over my head, to rap very hard against the rafters of the ceiling and bump against me in bed; but I paid no attention to them. After I had got to sleep there began such a din on the stairs as though a pile of barrels was being flung down them, though I knew the stairs were protected with chains and iron bars so that no one could come up; nevertheless, the barrels kept rolling down. I got up and went to the top of the stairs to see what it was, but found the stairs closed. Then I said: ‘If it is you, so be it,’ and commended myself to our Lord Christ of Whom it is written: ‘Thou shalt set all things under his feet,’ as Ps. viii. says, and got into bed again.” All this, so the account proceeds, had been related by Luther himself at Eisenach in 1546.[387] Cordatus, however, must have heard the story of the nuts from his own lips even before this. He tells it in 1537 as one of the numerous instances of the persecution Luther had had to endure from the spooks of the Wartburg: “Then he [the devil] took the walnuts from the table and flung them up at the ceiling the whole night long.”[388] It also happened (this supplements an incident touched upon above in vol. ii., p. 95), so Luther related on the above occasion, in 1546, that the wife of Hans Berlips, who “would much have liked to see [Luther], which was, however, not allowed,” came to the Castle. His quarters were changed and the lady was put into his room. “That night there was such an ado in the room that she fancied a thousand devils were in it.”[389] This story is not quite so well authenticated as the incidents which Luther relates as having happened to himself, for it is clear that he had it directly, or indirectly, only from this lady’s account. Her anxiety to see Luther would seem to stamp her as a somewhat eccentric person, and it may also be that she went into a room, already reputed to be haunted, quite full of the thought of ghosts and that her imagination was responsible for the rest.