“Why, your worship, my sow—your worship, my sow is dead: all of a sudden, this blessed morn, as I poured out her wash, down she lay all in the shivers; and if the poor dumb creature had been her own flesh and blood, my old woman could not ha’ taken on more. Says I, directly, ‘This is a bit of Margery’s work; for I see her brush the old sow with her black petticoat at the lane end, Sunday was a week.’ It’s quite a plain case you see, Sir Oliver.”
“Stand back, you silly man.”
“Silly, forsooth. I am thirty-seven year clerk of the parish, come next Lammas, and I say it’s writ on the Bible, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’”
“That is true enough—it is so; but how do you know a witch?”
“Why, I know that a man’s not a witch.”
“That is true, thou art a man and no witch. But how dost thou know one?”
“Why, it is an old woman, not to say any one, but a crook back, with a hooked nose, and a peaked chin like Margery.”
“Master Crumble, I have done with thee, and in the matter of thy sow’s death do acquit Margery.”
“That’s not crown law, nor Gospel charity,” said the old clerk, as he stepped back into the crowd, who muttered and whispered among each other till the next witness spoke out. This was the witch-finder.