he answered me by asking whether I had ever read Johannes Wierus, who
would hear nothing of witchcraft, and who argued that all witches were
melancholy persons who only imagined to themselves that they had a
_pactum_ with the devil; and that to him they seemed more worthy of pity
than of punishment? Hereupon I answered that I had not indeed read any
such book (for say, who can read all that fools write?), but that the
appearances here and in all other places proved that it was a monstrous
error to deny the reality of witchcraft, inasmuch as people might then
likewise deny that there were such things as murder, adultery, and theft.

But he called my _argumentum_ a _dilemma_, and after he had discoursed a
great deal of the devil, all of which I have forgotten, seeing it savoured
strangely of heresy, he said he would relate to me a piece of witchcraft
which he himself had seen at Wittenberg.

It seems that one morning, as an Imperial captain mounted his good charger
at the Elstergate in order to review his company, the horse presently
began to rage furiously, reared, tossed his head, snorted, kicked, and
roared, not as horses used to neigh, but with a sound as though the voice
came from a human throat, so that all the folks were amazed, and thought
the horse bewitched. It presently threw the captain, and crushed his head
with its hoof, so that he lay writhing on the ground, and straightway set
off at full speed. Hereupon a trooper fired his carabine at the bewitched
horse, which fell in the midst of the road, and presently died. That he,
Ruediger, had then drawn near, together with many others, seeing that the
colonel had forthwith given orders to the surgeon of the regiment to cut
open the horse and see in what state it was inwardly. However, that
everything was quite right, and both the surgeon and army physician
testified that the horse was thoroughly sound; whereupon all the people
cried out more than ever about witchcraft. Meanwhile he himself (I mean