d have allowed full consideration, while other jurymen were
eager to recall the mistake of the verdict; but the prisoner's silence
from failing to hear, when she was expected to explain, turned the
foreman against her, and caused him to declare:

"Whereupon these words were to me a principal evidence against her."

Still it was too monstrous to hang the poor old woman. After her
condemnation, the governor reprieved her, probably on the ground of the
illegality of setting aside the first verdict of the jury, in the
absence of any new evidence; but Mr. Parris, the power behind the
people, caused such an outcry against executive clemency to be raised,
that the governor withdrew his reprieve.

Next Sunday after the sentence, there was a scene in the church, the
record of which was afterward annotated by the church members in grief
and humiliation. After the sacrament, by a vote, it was unanimously
agreed, that sister Nurse, being convicted as a witch by the court,
should be excommunicated in the afternoon of the same day.

Charles Stevens, impelled by a morbid curiosity, went to the church
that afternoon. The place was thronged. Parris, with the triumphant
gleam of a devil on his hypocritical features, was in the pulpit with
the elders. The deacons presided below. The sheriff and his officers
brought in the witch and led her up the broad aisle, her chains clanking
as she stepped, and her poor old limbs scarcely able to bear their
weight. As she stood in the middle of the aisle, the Reverend Mr. Noyes
pronounced her sentence of expulsion from the church on earth and from
all hope of salvation hereafter. Having freely given her soul to Satan
by a seven years' service for diabolical powers, she was delivered over
to him forever. In conclusion, Reverend Mr. Noyes said:

"And now, vile woman, having sold yourself to the Devil, go to your
master amid the hottest flames of hell!"

She was aware that every eye regarded her with horror and hate,
unapproached under any circumstances; but she was able to sustain it.
She was still calm and at peace that day, and during the fortnight of
final waiting. When the fatal day of execution came, she traversed the
streets of Salem, between the houses in which she had been an honored
guest, and surrounded by well-known faces, and then there was the hard,
hard task, for her aged limbs, of climbing the rocky and steep path
on Witches' Hill to the place where the gibbets stood in a row, and th