tance of his children, which, as he had been informed, would, by a conviction of felony, have been forfeit to the crown.

In the following month the malady broke October. out in another neighborhood. One Ballard, of the town of Andover, whose wife was ill, in a way that perplexed their medical friend, sent to Salem to see what light could be obtained from the witch-detectors there. A party of them came to his help, and went to work with vigor. More than fifty persons at Andover fell under accusation, some of the weaker-minded of whom were brought to confess themselves guilty not only of afflicting their neighbors, but of practising such exercises as riding on animals and on sticks through the air.

There were no executions, however, after those which have been mentioned as occurring on one day of each of four successive months. There had been twenty human victims (Corey included), besides two dogs, their accomplices in the mysterious crime. Fifty persons had obtained a pardon by confessing; a hundred and fifty were in prison awaiting trial; and charges had been made against two hundred more. The accusers were now flying at high quarries. Hezekiah Usher, known to the reader as an ancient magistrate of fair consideration, was complained of, and Mrs. Thacher, mother-in-law of Curwin, the justice who had taken the earliest examinations. Zeal in pushing forward the prosecutions began to

seem dangerous; for what was to prevent an accused person from securing himself by confession, and then revenging himself on the accuser by arraigning him as a former ally?

Mrs. Hale, wife of the minister of Beverly who had been active in the prosecutions, and Dudley Bradstreet, of Andover, the old governor's son, who had granted warrants for the commitment. of some thirty or forty alleged witches, were now accused. The famous name of John Allyn, Secretary of Connecticut, was uttered in whispers. There had even begun to be a muttering about Lady Phipps, the governor's wife, and Mr. Willard, then minister of the Old South Church in Boston, and afterwards head of the College, who, after yielding to the infatuation in its earliest stage, had made himself obnoxious and suspected by partially retracing his steps. People began now to be almost as wild with the fear of being charged with witchcraft, or having the charge made against their friends, as they had been with the fear of suffering from its spells. The visitation, shocking as it had been, had been local. It had been almost confined to some towns of Essex County. In other parts of the province the public mind was calmer, or was turned in the different direction of disgust at the insane tragedies, and dread of their repetition. A person in Boston, whose name had begun to be used dangerously by the informers at Andover, instituted an action for defamation, laying his damages at a thousand

pounds; a measure which, while it would probably have been ruinous to him, had he made a mistake in choosing his time, was now found, at the turning of the tide, to have a wholesome effect.

After the convictions which were last mentioned, the Commission Court adjourned for two months. Thanks to the good sense of the people, it never met again. Before the time designated for its next session, the General Court of the province assembled, and the cry of the oppressed and miserable came to their ear. The General Court superseded the Court of Special Commission, the agent of all the cruelty, by con

Oct. 12.

stituting a regular tribunal of supreme Nov. 25. jurisdiction. When that court met at the appointed time, reason had begun to resume her

1693. sway, and the grand jury at once threw Jan. 3. out more than half of the presentments. They found true bills against twenty-six persons. The evidence against these was as good as any that had proved fatal in former trials; but only three of the arraigned were found guilty, and all these were pardoned. One of them may have owed her conviction to a sort of rude justice; she had before confessed herself a witch, and charged her husband, who was hanged on her information. Stoughton, who had been made Chief Justice, showed his disapprobation of the pardons by withdrawing from the bench "with pasFeb 21. sionate anger." Phipps wrote to the

Lords of Trade a disingenuous letter in which he attempted to divert from himself, chiefly at Stoughton's expense, whatever blame might be attached to the recent transactions; it even appeared to imply, what was contrary to the fact, that the executions did not begin till after his departure from Boston to the Eastern September. country.

1692.

The drunken fever-fit was now over, and with returning sobriety came profound contrition and disgust. A few still held out. There are some men who never own that they have been in the wrong, and a few men who are forever incapable of seeing it. Stoughton, with his bull-dog stubbornness, that might in other times have made him a Saint Dominic, continued to insist that the business had been all right, and that the only mistake was in putting a stop to it. Cotton Mather was always infallible in his own eyes. In the year after the executions, he had the satisfaction of studying another remarkable case of possession in Boston; but when it and the treatise which he wrote upon it failed to excite much attention, and it was plain that the tide had set the other way, he soon got his consent to let it run at its own pleasure, and turned his excursive activity to other objects. Saltonstall, horrified by the rigor of his colleagues, had resigned his place in the commission at an early period of the operations. When reason returned, Parris, the Salem minister, was driven from his place by the calm

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and decent, but irreconcilable indignation of his parishioners. Noyes, his well-intentioned but infatuated neighbor in the First Parish, devoting the remainder of his life to peaceful and Christian service, caused his church to cancel, by a formal and public act, their excommunication of 1712. the blameless Mrs. Nourse, who had died his peculiar victim.

Members of some of the juries, in a written public declaration, acknowledged the fault of their wrongful verdicts, entreated forgiveness, and protested that, "according to their present minds, they would none of them do such things again, on such grounds, for the whole world, praying that this act of theirs might be accepted in way of satisfaction for their offence." A day of General Fasting was proclaimed by authority, to be observed throughout the jurisdiction, in which the people were invited to pray that "whatever mistakes on either hand had been fallen into, either by the body of this people, or by any orders of men, referring to the late tragedy raised among us by Satan and his instruments, through the awful judgment of God, he would humble them. therefor, and pardon all the errors of his servants 1696. and people." On that day, Judge Sewall Jan. 14. rose in his pew in the Old South Church in Boston, handed to the desk a paper, acknowledging and bewailing his great offence, and asking the prayers of the congregation "that the Divine displeasure thereof might be stayed against