In his
account of the mob which beset him at Walney Island, he says: "When
I came to myself I saw James Lancaster's wife throwing stones at my
face, and her husband lying over me to keep off the blows and
stones; for the people had persuaded her that I had bewitched her
husband."

Cotton Mather attributes the plague of witchcraft in New England in
about an equal degree to the Quakers and Indians. The first of the
sect who visited Boston, Ann Austin and Mary Fisher,--the latter a
young girl,--were seized upon by Deputy-Governor Bellingham, in the
absence of Governor Endicott, and shamefully stripped naked for the
purpose of ascertaining whether they were witches with the Devil's
mark on them. In 1662 Elizabeth Horton and Joan Broksop, two
venerable preachers of the sect, were arrested in Boston, charged by
Governor Endicott with being witches, and carried two days' journey
into the woods, and left to the tender mercies of Indians and
wolves.)

All this is pleasant enough now; we can laugh at the Doctor and his
demons; but little matter of laughter was it to the victims on Salem
Hill; to the prisoners in the jails; to poor Giles Corey, tortured with
planks upon his breast, which forced the tongue from his mouth and his
life from his old, palsied body; to bereaved and quaking families; to a
whole community, priest-ridden and spectresmitten, gasping in the sick
dream of a spiritual nightmare and given over to believe a lie. We may
laugh, for the grotesque is blended with the horrible; but we must also
pity and shudder. The clear-sighted men who confronted that delusion in
its own age, disenchanting, with strong good sense and sharp ridicule,
their spell-bound generation,--the German Wierus, the Italian D'Apone,
the English Scot, and the New England Calef,--deserve high honors as the
benefactors of their race. It is true they were branded through life as
infidels and "damnable Sadducees;" but the truth which they uttered
lived after them, and wrought out its appointed work, for it had a Divine
commission and Godspeed.

"The oracles are dumb;
No voice nor hideous hum

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving;

Apollo from his shrine
Can now no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphus leaving."

Dimmer and dimmer, as the generations pass away, this tremendous terror,
this all