Mother Spuraway—Now torture was not allowed in England, though on the Continent and in Scotland it flared in witch trials to its fullest height. Mother Spuraway, therefore, had not been tortured—no more than Aderhold, no more than Joan, no more than others. But it was allowable, where confession did not come easily, to hasten it with fasting from bread, water, and sleep—all these being withholdings, not inflictings. There might be, too, insistent, long-continued questionings and threats and a multitude of small gins and snares. Mother Spuraway had been long weeks in gaol, and she was old and her faculties, once good, were perhaps not now hard to break down. At any rate, she had a ghastly look and a broken. Since she trembled so that she could not stand, they put her into a chair. “Now answer strictly the questions asked you, if you have any hope of mercy!” Mother Spuraway put her two trembling hands to her head. “Mercy? Yes, sirs, that is what I want. Mercy.” “Very well, then! Look on this man and tell us what you know of him.” The clerks’ pens began to scratch. Mother Spuraway’s gaze was so wandering that while it came across Aderhold, it went on at once to a cobweb above the judge’s chair. “He is the Devil,” she said. “You mean the Devil’s servant.” “Yes—oh, yes! Devil’s servant. I mean just what Your Honours want.” The Witch Judge thundered at her. “Woman! it is not what _we_ want. You are to speak the truth. Truth-speaking is what we want.” Mother Spuraway’s head nodded, her eyes fallen now from the cobweb to the judge’s robe. “Yes, sirs—yes, sirs. You shall have what you want. Oh, yes, sirs!” “She asserts,” said the counsel for the Crown, “that she tells the truth.—You were used to going to sabbats with this man?” “Yes, sirs,—sabbats, sabbats, sabbats, sabbats—” “Give her wine,” said the Witch Judge. “She is old. Let her rally herself. Give her wine.” A gaoler set a cup to her lips and she drank. “Now,” said the Crown, “tell us of these sabbats—circumstantially.” Mother Spuraway, revived by the wine, looked from floor to roof and roof to floor and at the commission and the Witch Judge and the bishop, and at the motes in a broken shaft of light. “We danced about the burned cot—all taking hands—so! Sometimes of dark nights we went _widdershins_ around Hawthorn Church—sometimes it was around the fairy oak at the Oak Grange. Sometimes we danced and sometimes we flew. We rode in the air. I had an oaken horse—and Grace had an elmen horse and Dorothy had a willow horse, and Elspeth No-Wit had a beechen horse, and Marget Primrose had a horse of yew—” There was a movement among the commission. “Marget Primrose,” exclaimed Squire Carthew, “died years ago!” “She came back. Marget had a yew horse—and I had an oaken horse—and there were other horses, but I never learned their names. And there were green men—” “Was this man in green?” “No, no! He had on a doctor’s cloak. Sometimes he fiddled for us when Satan grew tired.”