actual bodily presence of the Devil as one of the participants; while
it is also not improbable that, in some cases at least, heartless and
evil-minded persons worked upon the prevailing credulity to further
their own nefarious purposes. Our esteemed Bailiff has offered a
suggestion or two of considerable value on this point with regard to
certain Guernsey phases of the superstition. He thinks it highly
probable that some of these deluded women were actually the dupes of
unprincipled and designing men, who arrayed themselves in various
disguises and then met their unfortunate victims by appointment. This
idea is, indeed, borne out to a great extent by some of the
particulars stated in the following confessions. For instance, some of
the women assert that when they met the Devil he was in the form of a
dog, _but rather larger_; he always stood upon his hind legs--probably
the man's feet; and, when he shook hands with them, his paw _felt like
a hand_--doubtless it _was_ a hand. Another suggestion of the
Bailiff's is also worth notice. It is that the black ointment so often
mentioned as being rubbed on the bodies of the so-called witches, had
a real existence, and may have been so compounded as to act as a
narcotic or intoxicant, and produce a kind of extatic condition, just
as the injection of certain drugs beneath the skin is known to do now.
These suggestions are certainly worth consideration as offering
reasonable solutions of at least two difficulties connected with those
strange and lamentable superstitions. In one way or other there must
have been some physical basis for beliefs so widely extended and so
terribly real. Imagination, of course, possesses a marvellous power of
modification and exaggeration, but still it requires some germs of
fact around which to crystallise. And it is to the discovery of the
nature of such germs that a careful and conscientious observer will
naturally turn his attention.