She conceded here that the _Devil_ might be, and probably was, at work upon the children; but _his_ doings were beyond the reach of her perceptive faculties. _He_ made no communication to her. Thus early her words indicate that her knowledge of spiritual matters caused her to draw and adhere to a distinction between _The Devil_ and either _a Spirit_, or bands of spirits, which distinction she and other mediumistic ones of her times adhered to, while the public lacked knowledge that facts required it, and ignorantly called all visitants from spirit realms _The Devil_. When glancing at Cotton Mather's unpublished account of Mercy Short, we copied from it the following statement: "As the bewitched in other parts of the world have commonly had no other style for their tormentors but only THEY and THEM, so had Mercy Short." Clairvoyants and all who obtained knowledge of spirits through perceptions by their own interior organs seldom, if ever, have seriously spoken of either seeing, hearing, or feeling the _Devil_. Possibly, at times, some may have done so by way of accommodation to the unillumined world's modes of speech. But, as Mather says, they have, the world over, _generally_ called the personages perceived, "_They_" and "_Them_." Such a fact demands regard. The personal observers of spiritual beings have never been accustomed to designate them by bad names. Fair inference from this is, that such beings have not generally worn forbidding aspects. It has been the reporters, and not the utterers, of descriptive accounts of spiritual beings who have made use of the terms "devil," "satan," and the like. Mather perceived the common "style" of the bewitched, and yet the warping habit of Christendom made him preserve continuance of inaccurate reporting; for he, like most others in his day, persistently wrote "devil," where that name was not announced, and ought not to have been foisted in. Tituba saw no one whom she ever called _The Devil_, though history has taught that she did. "_Q._ Do you never see something appear in some shape? _A._ No. Never see anything." This answer is not true if construed literally in connection with its question. She did, as will soon appear, sometimes see many things clairvoyantly, but never _The Devil_, who had just before been mentioned. "_Q._ What familiarity have you with the devil, or what is it that you converse withal? Tell the truth, who it is that hurts them. _A._ The devil, for aught I know." She persistently admits that the devil _may_ be then and there at work, but asserts that she does not know anything about _him_. "_Q._ What appearance, or how doth he appear when he hurts them?" She makes no reply when asked how the _Devil_ hurts. She ignores _him_. "_Q._ With what shape, or what is _he_ like that hurts them? _A._ Like a man, I think. Yesterday, I being in the lean-to chamber, I saw a thing _like a man_, that told me serve him. I told him no, I would not do such thing."