Being thus heartened, the prior went on. Girolamo the Salernitan, he said, had been seen gnashing his teeth and shooting fire out of his eyes at the elevation of the Most Holy; had been heard muttering in an unknown tongue behind the high altar, and among the tombs and shrines of the saints; and also had he often been seen wandering by night, when honest Christians were in their beds, among the graves of the poor of Ely, and gazing at the moon and stars, and talking to some unseen demon. He had never been seen to eat and drink enough to support life; and therefore it was clear that he saved his stomach for midnight orgies in the church-yard with devils and witches. It was not true that all the devils at Crowland were sham-devils, for some of the novices and lay-brothers of the house, and some of the clowns of Crowland town, who had been seduced, and made to disguise themselves in order to give a cover to what was doing, had since declared that, although all their company made only twelve in number, they had seen twice twelve when the infernal lights were lit in the dark cellars of the house where their pranks began; and it was a notable fact that one of the Crowland hinds, first cousin to Orson the smith, had been so terrified at this increase of number and at all that he had heard and seen on that fearful night, that he had gone distraught,[218] and had never yet recovered it. It was known unto all men how, not only on that night and in that place, but also on many other nights and in many other places, the alien had made smells that were not of earth, nor capable of being made by earthly materials, and had made fire burn upon water, mixing flame and flood! Now, the Lord Abbat himself had said that fire and water would not mingle! Nor would they but by magic. The convent would all remember this! Not content with possessing the diabolical arts himself, Girolamo had imparted them to another: Elfric the sword-bearer, from whom better things might have been expected, considering his training in a godly house, had been seen mixing and using these hellish preparations which he could not have done if he had not first spat upon the cross and covenanted with witches and devils. Nay, so bold-faced had this young man been in his crime that he hath done this openly! The stranger had been seen many times in battle, and in the thickest of the fight, yet, while the Saxons fell thick around him, and every man that was not killed was wounded, he got no hurt,—no not the smallest! When the arrows came near him they turned aside or fell at his feet without touching him. There was a Norman knight, lately a prisoner in the Saxon Camp, who declared that when he was striking at the thin stranger with the certainty of cleaving him with his battle-axe, the axe turned aside in his firm strong hands as though some invisible hand had caught hold of it. Moreover, there was a Norman man-at-arms who had solemnly vowed