“Up with your pate, goody,” admonished the Beadle, “and speak out that their worships may hear, or into the stocks ye go to sweat in the sun while the boys tickle the soles o’ your feet.”
The witness wriggled uneasily as having had experience.
“A week ago, or it be twa or three or four past, your worships, the day afore this time, ’twixt noon an’ set o’ sun, there had been thunder an’ crook’d lightning, an’ hags rode by i’ the wind on branches. All the milk clabbered, if that will holpen ye to ’membrance o’ the day, worships.”
“Ay, reverend judges,” called out a woman’s voice from the audience, “sour milk the old silly brought me, four weeks come next Thursday. Good pence took he for his clabbered milk, and I was like to cuff——”
“The ducking-stool awaits scolding wives,” interrupted the chief justice, with a menacing look, and the woman subsided.
“That day at set o’ sun I was going into toone wi’ my buckets o’ milk when I spied a bramble rose. ‘Blushets,’ says I to them, ‘ye must be picked;’ for I thought to carry them to the toone an’ let them gae for summat gude to eat. So I set doone my pails to pull a handful o’ the pretty blushets. O’ raising my old een, my heart was like to jump out my throat, for there adoon the forest path, ’twixt the green, I saw the naughty maid i’ amiable converse wi’ Satan.”
“Dear Lord,” interrupted the little maid, sharply, “he was a very pleasant gentleman.”
“Silence!” cried the Beadle, tapping her head with his staff, on the end of which was a pewter-ball.
“As ye ken,” continued the old yeoman, “the Devil be most often a black man, but this time he was o’ fair colour, attired in most ungodly fashion in a gay velvet dooblet wi’ high boots. So ta’en up wi’ watching o’ the wickedness o’ Deliverance Wentworth was I, that I clean forgot myself——”