The Minister, with a few of the gentry, heard of their unholy friendship, and paid Campbell a visit. "At their first coming in the Devil says: 'Quum Literarum is good Latin.'" These are the first words of the Latin rudiments which scholars are taught when they go to the Grammar School. Then they all prayed, and a Voice came from under the bed: "Would you know the Witches of Glenluce?"The Voice named a few, including one long dead. But the Minister, with rare good sense, remarked that what Satan said was not evidence.
Let it be remarked that "the lad Tom" had that very day "come back with the Minister." The Fiend then offered terms. "Give me a spade and shovel, and depart from the house for seven days, and Iwill make a grave, and lie down in it, and trouble you no more."Hereon Campbell, with Scottish caution, declined to give the Devil the value of a straw. The visitors then hunted after the voice, observing that some of the children were in bed. They found nothing, and then, as the novelists say, "a strange thing happened."There appeared a naked hand and an arm, from the elbow down, beating upon the floor till the house did shake again. "The Fiend next exclaimed that if the candle were put out he would appear in the shape of Fireballs."Let it be observed that now, for the first time, we learn that all the scene occurred in candle-light. The appearance of floating balls of fire is frequent (if we may believe the current reports)at spiritualistic seances. But what a strange, ill-digested tale is Mr. Sinclair's! He lets slip an expression which shows that the investigators were in one room, the But, while the Fiend was diverting himself in the other room, the Ben! The Fiend (nobody going Ben) next chaffed a gentleman who wore a fashionable broad-brimmed hat, "whereupon he presently imagined that he felt a pair of shears going about his hat," but there was no such matter. The voice asked for a piece of bread, which the others were eating, and said the maid gave him a crust in the morning. This she denied, but admitted that something had "clicked" a piece of bread out of her hand.
The seance ended, the Devil slapping a safe portion of the children's bodies, with a sound resembling applause. After many months of this really annoying conduct, poor Campbell laid his case before the Presbyters, in 1655, thirty years before the date of publication. So a "solemn humiliation" was actually held all through the bounds of the synod. But to little purpose did Glenluce sit in sackcloth and ashes. The good wife's plate was snatched away before her very eyes, and then thrown back at her.
In similar "stirs," described by a Catholic missionary in Peru soon after Pizarro's conquest, the cup of an Indian chief was lifted up by an invisible hand, and set down empty. In that case, too, stones were thrown, as by the Devil of Glenluce.
And what was the end of it all? Mr. Sinclair has not even taken the trouble to inquire. It seems by some conjuration or other, the Devil suffered himself to be put away, and gave the weaver a habitation. The weaver "has been a very Odd man that endured so long these marvellous disturbances."This is the tale which Mr. Sinclair offers, without mentioning his authority. He complains that Dr. Henry More had plagiarised it, from his book of Hydrostatics. Two points may be remarked. First:
modern Psychical Inquirers are more particular about evidence than Mr. Sinclair. Not for nothing do we live in an age of science.
Next: the stories of these "stirs" are always much the same everywhere, in Glenluce, at Tedworth, where the Drummer came, in Peru, in Wesley's house, in heroic Iceland, when Glam, the vampire, "rode the roofs." It is curious to speculate on how the tradition of ****** themselves little nuisances in this particular manner has been handed down among children, if we are to suppose that children do the trick. Last autumn a farmer's house in Scotland was annoyed exactly as the weaver's home was, and that within a quarter of a mile of a well-known man of science. The mattress of the father was tenanted by something that wriggled like a snake. The mattress was opened, nothing was found, and the disturbance began again as soon as the bed was restored to its place. This occurred when the farmer's children had been sent to a distance.
One cannot but be perplexed by the problem which these tales suggest. Almost bare of evidence as they are, their great number, their wide diffusion, in many countries and in times ancient and modern, may establish some substratum of truth. Scott mentions a case in which the imposture was detected by a sheriff's officer.
But a recent anecdote makes me almost distrust the detection.
Some English people, having taken a country house in Ireland, were vexed by the usual rappings, stone-throwings, and all the rest of the business. They sent to Dublin for two detectives, who arrived.