The entertaining Defoe, who has illustrated this chapter more than once, thus speaks of these narrations. “The notion of Spirits appearing to discover where money has been buried, to direct people to dig for it, has so universally prevailed with womankind, I might say and even with mankind too, that it is impossible to beat it out of their heads; and if they should see anything which they call an apparition, they would to this day follow it, in hope to hear it give a stamp on the ground, as with its foot, and then vanish; and did it really do so, they would not fail to dig to the Centre (if they were able) in hopes of finding a pot of money hid there, or some old urn with ashes and Roman medals; in short, or some considerable treasure.” He is contemptuous, in spite of the numbers of such tales and the strong belief attaching to them, and narrates one only to show how easy it is to beat it down to sober fact. His summing-up of the matter is too good not to quote. “From all which reasons I must conclude, that the departed spirits know nothing of these things, that it is not in their power to discover their old hoards of money, or to come hither to show us how we may come at it; but that in short, all the old women’s stories, which we have told us upon that subject, are indeed old women’s stories, and no more. I cannot quit this part of my subject without observing that, indeed, if we give up all the stories of ghosts and apparitions, and spirits walking, to discover money that is hid, we shall lose to the age half the good old tales which serve to make up winter evening conversation, and shall deprive the doctrine of souls departed coming back hither to talk with us about such things, of its principal support; for this indeed is one of the principal errands such apparitions come about. It is without doubt that fancy and imagination form a world of apparitions in the minds of men and women, (for we must not exclude the ladies in this part, whatever we do;) and people go away as thoroughly possessed with the reality of having seen the Devil, as if they conversed face to face with him; when in short the matter is no more than a vapour of the brain, a sick delirious fume of smoke in the hypochondria; forming itself in such and such a figure to the eye-sight of the mind, as well as of the head, which all looked upon with a calm revision, would appear, as it really is, nothing but a nothing, a skeleton of the brain, a whimsy, and no more.”