Many interrogatories were put. Amongst others, how it was contrived that they could pass up and down chimneys and through unbroken panes of glass (to which it was replied that the devil removes all obstacles); how they were enabled to transport so many children at one time? &c. They acknowledged that 'till of late they had never power to carry away children; but only this year and the last: and the devil did at that time force them to it: that heretofore it was sufficient to carry but one of their own children or a stranger's child with them, which happened seldom: but now he did plague them and whip them if they did not procure him many children, insomuch that they had no peace or quiet for him. And whereas that formerly one journey a week would serve their turn from their own town to the place aforesaid, now they were forced to run to other towns and places for children, and that they brought with them some fifteen, some sixteen children every night.' As to their means of conveyance, they were sometimes men; at other times, beasts, spits, and posts: but a preferable mode was the riding upon goats, whose backs were made more commodious by the use of a magical ointment whenever a larger freight than usual was to be transported. Arrived at Blockula, their diabolical initiation commenced. First they were made to deny their baptism and take an oath of fealty to their new master, to whom they devoted soul and body to serve faithfully. Their new baptism was a baptism of blood: for their lord cut their fingers and wrote their names in blood in his book. After other ceremonies they sit down to a table, and are regaled with not the choicest viands (for such an occasion and from such a host)--broth, bacon, cheese, oatmeal. Dancing and fighting (the latter a peculiarity of the Northern Sabbath) ensue alternately. They indulge, too, in the debauchery of the South: the witches having offspring from their intercourse with the demons, who intermarry and produce a mongrel breed of toads and serpents. As interludes, it may be supposed, to the serious part of the entertainment the fiend would contrive various jokes, affecting to be dead; and, a graver joke, he would bid them to erect a huge building of stone, in which they were to be saved upon the approaching day of judgment. While engaged at this work he threw down the unfinished house about their ears, to the consternation, and sometimes injury, of his vassals.[155] Some of the witnesses spoke of a great dragon encircled with flames, and an iron chair; of a vision of a burning pit. The minister of the district gave his evidence that, having been suffering from a painful headache, he could account for the unusual severity of the attack only by supposing that the witches had celebrated one of their infernal dances upon his head while asleep in bed: and one of them, in accordance with this conjecture, acknowledged that the devil had sent her with a sledge-hammer to drive a nail