pectral puppet play," which, beginning with the malicious pranks of a
few children who accused certain uncanny old women and other persons of
mean condition and suspected lives of having tormented them with magic,
gradually drew into its vortex victims of the highest character, and
resulted in the judicial murder of over nineteen people. Many of the
possessed pretended to have been visited by the apparition of a little
black man, who urged them to inscribe their names in a red book which
he carried--a sort of muster-roll of those who had forsworn God's
service for the devil's. Others testified to having been present at
meetings of witches in the forest. It is difficult now to read without
contempt the "evidence" which grave justices and learned divines
considered sufficient to condemn to death men and women of unblemished
lives. It is true that the belief in witchcraft was general at that
time all over the civilized world, and that sporadic cases of
witch-burnings had occurred in different parts of America and Europe.
Sir Thomas Browne, in his _Religio Medici_, 1635, affirmed his belief
in witches, and pronounced those who doubted of them "a sort of
atheist." But the superstition came to a head in the Salem trials and
executions, and was the more shocking from the general high level of
intelligence in the community in which these were held. It would be
well if those who lament the decay of "faith" would remember what
things were done in New England in the name of faith less than two
hundred years ago. It is not wonderful that, to the Massachusetts
Puritans of the seventeenth century, the mysterious forest held no
beautiful suggestion; to them it was simply a grim and hideous
wilderness, whose dark aisles were the ambush of prowling savages and
the rendezvous of those other "devil-worshipers" who celebrated there a
kind of vulgar Walpurgis night.

The most important of original sources for the history of the
settlement of New England are the journals of William Bradford, first
governor of Plymouth, and John Winthrop, the second governor of
Massachusetts, which hold a place corresponding to the writings of
Captain John Smith in the Virginia colony, but are much more sober and
trustworthy. Bradford's _History of Plymouth Plantation_ covers the
period from 1620 to 1646. The manuscript was used by later annalists
but remained unpublished, as a whole, until 1855, having been lost
during the War of the Revolution and