Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/453

Rh ends, Dow lit them; then, muttering some unintelligible words, he set fire to the flax under which the wife's friend was hidden, and cried, "Come forth, thou evil one, and begone for ever!" Out jumped the fellow covered in flames, and with an unearthly yell disappeared through the open door. To his dying day the sobered husband maintained that Lorenzo Dow could raise the Devil, for he had seen him do it, and had seen and smelt Satan himself.

[Lorenzo Dow was born at Coventry, Conn., U.S.A., in 1777, and died in Washington City in 1834. He joined the Methodists at an early age, and became an itinerant preacher. In 1799 he came over to Ireland on a preaching mission, returning to America in 1801. In 1805 he made a journey to England with the object of introducing the camp-meeting into this country. He made a great impression in the north of England, and visited our island again in 1818–19; but from his published journals, which are very extensive, I cannot gather that he ever visited Oxfordshire, or was even in its vicinity. The practical joke above attributed to him by T. J. Carter occurs in Hans Andersen's Big Klaus and Little Klaus. Mr. R. L. Garner compares the procedure of Yassi, the mysterious crime-detector of the Ogowe tribes, to that of "old Lorenzo Dow," and tells the following stories of him. "On one