your

CHAPTER XIV.

will suppose, perhaps, that while the Indians were pouring down like wild beasts on the houses and villages of the settlers in Massachusetts, scalping, and murdering, and carrying women and children into captivity, the Governor, and the magistrates, and the people spent all their time in trying to devise means to protect themselves from their cruel enemy. Not at all. Most of their time was spent in hunting crazy old women, and other unfortunate persons who were accused of being witches. Long before, as you will recollect, poor old Widow Hibbins had been put to death as a witch, and now the rage for finding witches and killing them began to revive again.

In a respectable family in Boston, named GoodWIN, there lived a young Irish servant girl. This girl was accused by her master's daughter, a little child of thirteen, of having stolen something in the house. The girl's mother, an old Irishwoman, did not believe that her daughter was guilty, and went in a furious rage to the Goodwins's house and said so. Whereupon Goodwin's daughter, with her brothers and sisters, in order to be revenged upon the old Irishwoman, pretended she had bewitched them.

Sometimes they barked like dogs, or mewed like cats: sometimes they said they were deaf, or blind,

or dumb; sometimes they threw their arms and legs in the air, and screamed out, and rolled themselves on the floor; all which, they said, was the work of the old woman, who made them do these things whether they would or no. Of course, we know very well that no old woman, Irish or not, could make little girls bark or mew, or throw up their arms or legs, or do any other foolish thing of the kind unless they liked. And I think if these little Goodwins had lived in our day, it would not have been so very difficult to cure them.

But at Boston, one hundred and sixty years ago, people believed in witchcraft, and when they heard the story of the Goodwins' children, they had the old Irishwoman arrested at once and tried as a witch. The poor old creature was terribly frightened, as well she might be; when they questioned her she stammered, and stuttered, and made foolish answers; often using her own native Irish tongue, which is a queer sort of language, with uncouth sounds and odd words in it.

When the judges heard her foolish answers, they looked very wisely at each other; but when she spoke in Irish, they said there could no longer be any doubt on the point, and hanged her forthwith as a witch.

He

One of the chief instigators of this murderfor I can call it by no other name-was COTTON MATHER, a very learned man and a preacher. was so firm a believer in witchcraft that he got little Goodwin to his house, and put all sorts of absurd questions to her, to find out what kind of people the

witches were; and she-little rogue!-managed, by pretending to be bewitched, to deceive him thoroughly.

I think I can see grave Cotton Mather, with a very long face, sitting with this little minx; she squealing, and barking, and crying that the witches were pinching her, and he poring over great big books and watching her with intense interest.

It would have been well, however, if nothing worse had come of this absurd belief. But the little Goodwins had succeeded so well that another batch of little girls, at Salem (now called Danvers), played the same tricks shortly afterward. Others followed their example, and very soon every body was talking of the witches; and a great number of respectable women were sent to prison on vaguc, ridiculous accusations. People said that the witches had appeared to them in their sleep, and had asked them to make a compact with the devil, threatening, if they did not, to pinch, bite, scratch, burn, or otherwise worry them. Others would throw themselves down on the ground and wriggle as if they were in a fit, and say it was all the doing of the witches. In fact, there was so much of this sort of nonsense going on at Salem, that I think the whole village was turned into a madhouse.

The Puritan preachers, I am sorry to say, did not show much sense or humanity. Many of them were men of dark, gloomy minds, who read the Old Testament more than the New, and liked to talk about Agag being hewed in pieces, and the Philistines being slaughtered by the Jews. They meant

very well, no doubt; but they spent so much time in poring over these stories of the old Jewish times, and paid so little attention to the sweet spirit of the Gospel, that their brains became a little confused in the end.

I am afraid, too, that they had an eye to their own importance, and tried to make the people believe they were a very superior sort of men, and that it was dreadfully sinful to oppose them in any way. For I notice that a good many of those who were called witches had fallen out with the preachers. At all events, several women and a few men were tried, chiefly through their influence, and hanged. One wrong leads to another. When the witch-hunters could not get evidence against the poor creatures that were tried, they put the witnesses to the torture. No one is so foolish nowadays as to fancy that the truth can be got out of a man better by squeezing his legs, or breaking his arms, or tearing his flesh. Formerly it was quite common to use these tortures in order to extort con

fessions from prisoners or witnesses; and, as you may easily suppose, under the horrible pain thus inflicted, the victims could be made to say any thing. Thus, I am not at all surprised to find that the two little children of MARTHA CARRIER, after being tied up till the blood was ready to gush out, pretended to confess that their mother was a witch. Or that grown-up people, in similar pain, or frightened by the fierce Puritan, Cotton Mather, and his friends, swore that they saw this or that old woman coming down their chimney on a broomstick. Or that MAR

GARET JACOBS, in a moment of agony and weakness, wrote a false account of her old grandfather having meetings with the devil. Or that many old, weak persons confessed that they were themselves witches.

These lying stories were good enough for the purpose of the preachers and magistrates, and for some time the hanging went on at a furious rate. They even hanged a minister, which I think was rather a blunder on the part of Cotton Mather and his friends. As to old women and old men, there was hardly rope enough in Salem to string them up.

At last, however, people began to come to their senses. One man, a farmer, had a servant who pretended to be bewitched, and to roll on the ground in a fit. But when his master got a stout stick, and began to belabor him with it, it was quite surprising to see how rapidly he recovered, and never had any more trouble from the witches. Then a merchant of Boston named CALEF, came out boldly, and said he did not believe in witches at all.

This was a terrible shock to Cotton Mather and his friends, who began to call Calef all the hard names they could think of. Mather said he was a "coal sent from hell," and tried very hard to have him sent to prison for telling the truth. But Calef didn't mind in the least being called a coal, and was not at all afraid of Cotton Mather.

So in the end, as the people of Massachusetts were not all mad, they began to think that Calef might be right and the preachers wrong. It took some time for this impression to spread; and Harvard College, and many of the magistrates, did all they could to VOL. I.-L