All this answers to an ancient example—the disturbances in Mr. Wesley’s house at Epworth, December 1715 to January 1716.[16] The house was a new one, rebuilt in 1709. We have Mr. Samuel Wesley’s Journal, with many contemporary letters from members of the family, and later reminiscences. There were many lively girls in the house, and two servants—a maid and a man, recently engaged. The disturbances began with groanings; then came knockings, which flitted about the house. Mr. Wesley heard nothing till December 21. The knocks replied to those made by the family, but they never could imitate the sounds. Mrs. Wesley and Emily saw an object “like a badger” run from under a bed and vanish. The mastiff was much alarmed by the sounds. Mr. Wesley was “thrice pushed by invisible power.” The bogie was a Jacobite, as was Mrs. Wesley: Mr. Wesley was for King George. The knocks were violent when that usurper was prayed for. They did not try praying for King James. Robin, the servant, saw a hand-mill work violently. “Naught vexed me but that it was empty. I thought, had it but been full of malt, he might have ground his heart out for me.” But this was a jocose, not an industrious devil. Robin called it “old Jeffries,” after a gentleman lately dead; the family called it “Jeffrey,” unless one name is a mere misspelling. It “seemed to sweep after” Nancy Wesley, when she swept the chambers. “She thought he might have done it for her, and saved her the trouble.” Mrs. Wesley concealed the matter from her husband, “lest he should fancy it was against his own death” (Letter of January 12, 1716-17). This belief in noises foretelling death is very common; compare Scott’s nocturnal disturbances at Abbotsford when Bullock, his agent in building it, was dying in London. The racket occurred on April 28 and 29, 1818, and Scott examined the scene “with Beardie’s broadsword under my arm.”[17] Bullock died in Tenterden Street, in London, whether on April 28 or 29 is not easily to be ascertained. “The noise resembled half a dozen men putting up boards and furniture, and nothing can be more certain than that there was nobody on the premises at the time.”[18] The noises used to follow Hetty Wesley, and thump under her feet, as under those of C. in Professor Alexander’s narrative. Mr. Wesley’s plate “danced before him on the table a pretty while, without anybody’s stirring the table.”[19] The disturbances quieted down in January, but recurred on March 31. Similar phenomena had occurred “long before” in the family.[20] “The sound very often seemed in the air, in the middle of a room, nor could they ever make any such themselves by any contrivance.”[21] On February 16, 1740, twenty-three years later, Emily writes to Jack about “that _wonderful thing_ called by us _Jeffrey_.... That something calls on me against any extraordinary new affliction.”