Night was almost invariably the time for the Sabbat, although, as Delrio says, there is no actual reason why these evil rites should not be performed at noon, for the Psalmist speaks of “the terror of the night,” the “business that walketh about in the dark,” and of “the noonday devil.”[19] (“Non timebis a timore nocturno ... a negotio perambulante in tenebris; ab incursu et dæmonio meridiano.”) And so Delrio very aptly writes: “Their assemblies generally are held at dead of night when the Powers of Darkness reign; or, sometimes, at high noon, even as the Psalmist saith, when he speaks of ‘the noonday devil.’ The nights they prefer are Monday and Thursday.”[20] The time at which these Sabbats began was generally upon the stroke of midnight. “Les Sorciers,” says Boguet, “vont enuiron la minuict au Sabbat.”[21] It may be remembered that in the _Metamorphoseon_ of Apuleius, I, xi, the hags attack Socrates at night “circa tertiam ferme uigiliam.” Agnes Sampson, “a famous witch”—as Hume of Godscroft in his Account of Archibald, ninth Earl of Angus, calls her—commonly known as the wise wife of Keith, who made a prominent figure[22] in the Fian trials, 1590, confessed that the Devil met her, “being alone, and commanded her to be at North-Berwick Kirk the next night,” and accordingly she made her way there as she was bid “and lighted at the Kirk-yard, or a little before she came to it, about eleven hours at even.”[23] In this case, however, the Sabbat was preceded by a dance of nearly one hundred persons, and so probably did not commence until midnight. Thomas Leyis, Issobell Coky, Helen Fraser, Bessie Thorn, and the rest of the Aberdeen witches, thirteen of whom were executed in 1597, and seven more banished, generally met “betuixt tuell & ane houris at nycht.”[24] Boguet notes that in 1598 the witch Françoise Secretain “adioustoit qu’elle alloit tousiours au Sabbat enuiron la minuit, & beaucoup d’autres sorciers, que i’ay eu en main, ont dit le mesme.” In 1600 Anna Mauczin of Tubingen confessed that she had taken part in witch gatherings which she dubbed _Hochzeiten_. They seem to have been held by a well just outside the upper gate of Rotenburg, and her evidence insists upon “midnight dances” and revelling. A Scotch witch, Marie Lamont, “a young woman of the adge of Eighteen Yeares, dwelling in the parish of Innerkip” on 4 March, 1662, confessed most ingenuously “that when shee had been at a mietting sine Zowle last, with other witches, in the night, the devill convoyed her home in the dawing.”[25]