Bishop "had
given a look toward the great and spacious meeting-house of Salem, and
immediately a daemon, invisibly entering the house, tore down a part of
it." It may be guessed that a plank or a partition had given way under
the pressure of the crowd of lookers-on collected for so extraordinary
a spectacle.

At the end of another four weeks the court sat again and sentenced
five women, two of Salem, and one each of Amesbury, Ipswich, and
Topsfield, all of whom were executed, protesting their innocence. In
respect to one of them, Rebecca Nourse, a matron eminent for piety and
goodness, a verdict of acquittal was first rendered. But Stoughton
sent the jury out again, reminding them that in her examination, in
reference to certain witnesses against her who had confest their own
guilt, she had used the expression, "they came among us." Nourse was
deaf, and did not catch what had been going on. When it was afterward
repeated to her she said that by the coming among us she meant that
they had been in prison together. But the jury adopted the court's
interpretation of the word as signifying an acknowledgment that they
had met at a witch orgy. The Governor was disposed to grant her a
pardon. But Parris, who had an ancient grudge against her, interfered
and prevailed. On the last communion day before her execution she was
taken into church, and formally excommunicated by Noyes, her
minister....

In the course of the next month, in which the Governor left Boston for
a short tour of inspection in the Eastern country, fifteen
persons--six women in one day, and on another eight women and one
man--were tried, convicted, and sentenced. Eight of them were hanged.
The brave Giles Corey, eighty years of age, being arraigned, refused
to plead. He said that the whole thing was an imposture, and that it
was of no use to put himself on his trial, for every trial had ended
in a conviction,--which was the fact. It is shocking to relate that,
suffering the penalty of the English common law for a contumacious
refusal to answer,--the _peine forte et dure_,--he was prest to death
with heavy weights laid on his body. By not pleading he intended to
protect the inheritance of his children, which, as he had been
informed, would by a conviction of felony have been forfeit to the
crown.

There had been twenty human victims, Corey included; besides two dogs,
their accomplices in the mysterious crime. Fifty persons had obtained
a pardon by confessin