Although his dealings must be described as mild compared with the ghastly inconceivable tortures in vogue with the inquisitors upon the Continent,[520] his victims were yet baited and handled with the grossest cruelty. They were supposed not to weep,[521] being witches, though indeed cause enough was given them. It is remarkable in this connection that Shelley,[522] with how much accuracy I am not aware, alludes to the “dry fixed eyeball” of the tortured. Hutchinson[523] held this phenomenon to have been due to prolonged deprivation of sleep and exhaustion. Doubtless the weary length of the investigations, and often the age and senile desiccation of the victims, might easily explain a state of tearlessness whenever it was really prevalent. They were supposed to possess an insensible part in their bodies,[524] and the examiners would prick over them to try to find it out. Especially, a witch was affirmed to have somewhere upon her person the “Devil’s mark.” “Some bigg or place upon their body where he” (the familiar, imp, or spirit) “sucketh them.”[525] This alleged “mark” might be almost anything or nothing; from an abnormal, and perhaps atavic, teat, down to a birthmark, mole, old scar, or even a tiny vein under an eyelid. They were supposed also to float upon being “swum.” They were, for the most part, wizen, old creatures, clad in long-used, greasy garments.[526] Such skirts would retain much air; they might be bound so as to favour this, or spread, as with Ophelia, widely inflated. It was quite likely they should thus be upborne (and also, for they were mostly poor and thin, that the heavy, sometimes chained, Bible should outweigh them in the ordeal with scales). But ordeals are uncertain and dangerous unless they can be carefully manipulated. Mr. Hopkins had been keen on the water test; it was the finishing touch and proof at the end of a long series of torments and examinations. But a day came, it is said, on which a few brave Englishmen, who had perhaps lost some one near and dear to them at his hands, laid hold upon the witch-finder himself, and binding him in a sack, cast him into a pool. It was a bold act, in those savage days, to interfere with any kind of inquisition. Catholic or Puritan, and was no doubt attended with great risk. But only for a moment in this case, for there before them bobbed the dread discoverer of witches, floating upon the surface of the water; and all declared the devil got his own. But such an end was altogether unexpected and unusual; it was downright bad luck and misfortune, from Mr. Hopkins’ point of view. His position appeared unassailable, and indeed probably would have been, if he had kept to the right sort of people, and practised on the isolated or unpopular, who could have been legitimately sacrificed. All he had done was quite lawful and regular.