Among the many women charged with witchcraft in England, by the famous Matthew Hopkins, the “witch-finder” in the middle of the Seventeenth century, was one, at Yarmouth, of whom it is reported, that her first temptation came to her when she went home from her place of employment, discouraged and exasperated by her trials. “That night when she was in bed, she heard a knock at the door, and going to her window, she saw (it being moonlight) a tall black man there: and asked what he would have? He told her that she was discontented, because she could not get work; and that he would put her into a way that she should never want anything. On this she let him in, and asked him what he had to say to her. He told her he must first see her hand; and taking out something like a penknife, he gave it a little scratch, so that a little blood followed; a scar being still visible when she told the story. Then he took some of the blood in a pen, and pulling a book out of his pocket, bid her write her name; and when she said she could not, he said he would guide her hand. When this was done, he bid her now ask what she would have.”[185] In signing with her own blood, she had pledged her very life to the “tall black man.” Cotton Mather, in his “Wonders of the Invisible World,” cites a Swedish trial for witchcraft, where the possessed children, who were witnesses, said that the witches, at the trysting-place where they were observed, were compelled “to give themselves unto the devil, and vow that they would serve him. Hereupon they cut their fingers, and with blood writ their names in his book.” In some cases “the mark of the cut finger was [still] to be found.” Moreover the devil gave meat and drink both to the witches and to the children they brought with them. Again, Mather cites the testimony of a witness who had been invited to covenant with the Devil, by signing the Devil’s book. “Once, with the book, there was a pen offered him, and an inkhorn with liquor in it that looked like blood.”[186] Another New England writer on witchcraft says that “the witch as a slave binds herself by vow, to believe in the Devil, and to give him either body or soul, or both, under his handwriting, or some part of _his_ blood.”[187] It is, evidently, on this popular tradition, that Goethe’s Faust covenants in blood with Mephistopheles. MEPHISTOPHELES. “But one thing!--accidents may happen; hence A line or two in writing grant, I pray.” FAUST. . . . . . . . . . . “Spirit of evil! what dost thou require? Brass, marble, parchment, paper, dost desire? Shall I with chisel, pen, or graver, write? Thy choice is free; to me ’tis all the same.” MEPHISTOPHELES. . . . . . . . . . . “A scrap is for our compact good. Thou under-signest merely with a drop of blood.” . . . . . . . . . . “Blood is a juice of very special kind.”[188]