a general court. We all know, even in these
modern days, what a furor can be created in a church, when a part of the
organization is arrayed against the pastor. Sometimes the divine
shepherd loses his temper and says ugly things against his flock, and
thinks many which he does not utter.

Parris was a man filled with ambition and prejudice. He was a fanatic
and easily driven to frenzy by opposition. An unfavorable criticism
upset his highly nervous organism, and he set out to find some proof in
the Scriptures for condemning his enemies. It never entered into his
mind to love those who hated him.

Mr. Parris had lived in the West Indies for several years before going
to Salem, and had brought with him some slaves purchased from the
Spaniards. Among them were two famous in history as John and Tituba his
wife. Historians disagree as to the nationality of these slaves. Some
aver they were Indians, others call them negroes, while some state they
were half and half. Whatever may have been their nationality, their
practices were the fetichism of western Africa, and there can be no
doubt that negro blood predominated in their veins. All their training,
their low cunning and beastly worship, their deception and treachery
were utterly unlike the characteristics of the early aborigines of
America, and were purely African.

John and Tituba were full of the gross superstitions of their people,
and were of the frame and temperament best adapted to the practice of
demonology.

In the family of Samuel Parris, his daughter, a child of nine years, and
his niece, a girl of less than twelve, began to have strange caprices.
During such a state of affairs the pastor actually permitted to be
formed, with his own knowledge, a society of young girls between the
ages of eight and eighteen to meet at the parsonage, strangely
resembling those "circles" of our own time called seances, for
spiritualistic revelations. There can be no doubt that the young girls
were laboring under a strong nervous and mental excitement, which was
encouraged rather than repressed by the means employed by their
spiritual director. Instead of treating them as subjects of morbid
delusion, Mr. Parris regarded them as victims of external and diabolical
influence, and strangely enough this influence, on the evidence of the
children themselves, was supposed to be exercised by some of the most
pious and respectable people of the community. As it was those who
opposed Mr.