This
last feat of "appearing invisibly" would have been worth seeing. In 1554,
the Devil came of a Christmas eve to Lawrence Doner, a parish priest in
Saxony, and asked to be confessed. "Admissus, horrendas adversus Christum
filium Dei blasphemias evomuit. Verum cum virtute verbi Dei a parocho
victus esset, intolerabili post se relicto foetore abiit." Splendidly
dressed, with two companions, he frequented an honest man's house at
Rothenberg. He brought with him a piper or fiddler, and contrived feasts
and dances under pretext of wooing the goodman's daughter. He boasted
that he was a foreign nobleman of immense wealth, and, for a time, was as
successful as an Italian courier has been known to be at one of our
fashionable watering-places. But the importunity of the guest and his
friends at length displicuit patrifamilias, who accordingly one evening
invited a minister of the Word to meet them at supper, and entered upon
pious discourse with him from the word of God. Wherefore, seeking other
matter of conversation, they said that there were many facetious things
more suitable to exhilarate the supper-table than the interpretation of
Holy Writ, and begged that they might be no longer bored with Scripture.
Thoroughly satisfied by their singular way of thinking that his guests
were diabolical, paterfamilias cries out in Latin worthy of Father Tom,
"Apagite, vos scelerati nebulones!" This said, the tartarean impostor and
his companions at once vanished with a great tumult, leaving behind them
a most unpleasant foetor and the bodies of three men who had been hanged.
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