He drew the Mystic circle’s bound,
With skull and cross-bones fenced around;
He traced full many a sigil there;
He muttered many a backward pray’r,
That sounded like a curse—
“He comes!”—he cried with wild grimace,
“The fellest of Apollyon’s race!”—
—Then in his startled pupil’s face
He dashed—an Empty Purse!!
Thomas De Quincey, one of the best of humorists wrote Confessions of an Opium Eater, with alas, all the necessary conditions to speak at first hand.