George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

It was soon easy to perceive by their movements what was their object. With supernatural strength and dexterity they proceeded to disorganize the whole internal paraphernalia of the deacon's establishment. They tore up and emptied all his vats, but carefully deposited the dregs and filth of distillation, wherever they found it, in a large muddy cistern, which they discovered conveniently disposed at one end of the distillery. They took in pieces the whole machinery of distillation, and by a wonderful metamorphosis, they so re-modelled itsjparts and refitted the vats, as to make them admirably suited to the processes of malting and brewing. The worm of the still they uncoiled, but sheathed the bottom of the new vats with the lead that came out of it.

Some of them I observed were busy in bringing in and piling up huge bags of barley; others in constructing the furnaces and chambers where the malt was to be dried; others in filling the cistern, into which the dregs of the vats had been poured, with dirty water dipped from a stagnant pond, covered with green slime and infested with crawling reptiles, hard by the distillery. They set the barley for malt, and so peculiar were the qualities of the malting mixture in the cistern, and so admirable the skill with which they had prepared the furnace and floors for kiln-drying, that a process was accomplished in less than an hour, which ordinarily demanded some days for its completion. The task of mashing was an easy one, and the wort was drawn off and boiled down, and the coolers filled, with surprising celerity; and to crown all, they set the liquor for fermentation in a tun of prodigious dimensions, which one party had been engaged in constructing, while the others were busied in the process of malting, mashing, boiling, and cooling.

In the midst of all this astounding bustle, the man in the countingroom was neither idle, nor satisfied with the mere superintendence of his energetic workmen. He stripped off his broadcloth and velvet, disencumbered himself of his huge boots, and appeared the most gaunt, active, and demoniacal among the whole crew. They leaped, and grinned, and jibbered, and swore, in so terrific a manner, that it seemed as if the thunder, which was breaking in such tremendous artillery across the heavens, would have been charged to peal in among them, for their horrible profaneness.

But the most astonishing scene took place while they boiled down the liquor. They gathered in a double circle, and danced to music as infernal as the rhymes they chanted were malignant, amidst the bickering flames and smoke of the furnace, round about the huge copper cauldron of boiling liquid, into which each of them, from moment to moment, adapting the action to the words they sung, threw such ingredients as they had provided for the occasion. I shall scarcely be credited, while I relate what poisonous and nauseous drugs they cast into the agitated mixture. Opium, henbane, coculus-indicus, nux vomica, grains of paradise, and Bohemian rosemary; aloes, gentian, quassia, wormwood, and treacle; capsicum, cassia-buds, isinglass, cods-sounds, and oil of vitriol, were dashed in turn amidst the foaming mass of materials, which they stirred and tasted, scalding hot as it was, with a ferocious exulting delight, that seemed to increase in proportion as the quality of its properties grew more pernicious. They could not but remind me of Shakspeare's witches on the blasted heath of midnight, when the charm was brewing for Duncan's murder. Indeed, the song they sung, as they leaped about the cauldron, and thre^ in their infernal mixtures, was so similar to that of those "secret, black, and midnight hags," when they were going to do "the deed without a name," that I think the chorus, in which they all joined, must have been gathered from some copy of the beldams' accursed incantations. They repeated something very like the following stanzas, only more horrible: