They were all laughing at the Perrys‘ execution: the crowd of spectators, women and children, the Perrys under the gallows, and the executioners themselves, who were laughing so hard that they had trouble tightening the noose properly. Some attendees might have been embarrassed at first, but soon they joined in, unable to hold back the laughter, least of all young Perry, who laughed his heart out as the rope was placed around his neck, with the result that the bystanders could barely make out his last words, which could have been, roughly: …you are in for quite a surprise…but the actual words drowned in the noise and slur of the indistinct gurgling from all sides.

All this has been reliably witnessed and described many a times. There is absolutely no reason to doubt it. Not even the fact that young Perry – who was the last to hang – was doing his best to entertain the crowd by addressing the spectators directly and cheering at his own folks hanging from nooses, since his mother and his elder brother had been strung up before him, though the exact words have not been passed on in later writings, their sense and meaning being merely hinted at. So if the demons, as some do believe, make use of a special language, it is, however, not recorded in the word collections listing the subtle use of our ordinary language.