which answered questions, ’at the very place where I struck, and beneath my finger.  I cannot explain the fact, which, I am convinced, was not caused by the child, nor by any one in the house.’  M. Cheval saw things fly about, he slept in the boy’s room, and his pillow flew from under his head.  He lay down between the children, holding their hands, and placing his feet on theirs, when the coverlet of the bed arose, and floated away.  The Marquis de Mirville had a number of answers by raps, which staggered him very much, but the force was quite feeble when he asked for portions of Italian music.  Madame de St. Victor felt herself pushed, and her clothes pulled in the cure’s house, when no one was near her.  She also saw furniture behave in a fantastic manner, and M. Raoul Robert de St. Victor had many such experiences.  M. Paul de St. Victor was not present.  A desk sailed along:  paused in air, and fell:  ’I had never seen a movement of this kind, and I admit that I was alarmed’.  Le Seigneur, a farmer, saw ‘a variety of objects arise and sail about’:  he was certain that the boys did not throw them, and when in their company, in the open air, between Cideville and Anzooville, ’I saw stones come to us, without striking us, hurled by some invisible force’.  There was other confirmatory evidence, from men of physic, and of the law.

The juge de paix, as we have seen, pronounced that the clearest point in the case was ‘the absence of known cause for the effects,’ and he non-suited Thorel, the plaintiff.

The cause of the phenomena is, of course, as obscure for us as for the worthy magistrate.  We can only say that, when precisely similar evidence was brought before judges and juries in England and New England, at a period when medicine, law, and religion all recognised the existence of witchcraft, magic, and diabolical possession, they had scarcely any choice but to condemn the accused.  Causa patet, they said:  ’The devil is at the bottom of it all, and the witch is his minister’.

The affair of Cideville by no means stands alone in modern France.  In 1853, two doctors and other witnesses signed a deposition as to precisely similar phenomena attending Adelaide Francoise Millet, a girl of twelve, at Songhien, in Champagne.  The trouble, as at Cock Lane, began by a sound of scratching on the wood of her bed.  The clerk of the juge de la paix, the master of the Douane, two doctors, and others visited her, and tied her hands and feet.  The noise continued.  Mysterious missiles pursued a girl in Martinique, in 1854.  The house, which was stormed by showers of stone, in Paris (1846), entirely baffled the police. {283a} There is a more singular parallel to the Cideville affair, the account was printed from the letter of a correspondent in the Abeille of Chartres, March 11, 1849. {283b} At Gaubert, near Guillonville, a man was imprisoned for thefts of hay, the property of a M. Dolleans.  Two days after his arrest, namely, on December 31,