ion. It can see
whatever it wills, hear whatever is desired, and like wax is ready to
receive any impression one chooses to put on it. A child can be made to
believe it sees the most unnatural things, and in a few days Tituba and
John had thoroughly convinced the children that they saw spirits and
witches in the air all about them.

One evening, a pretty young woman, not over twenty-one or two, came to
the parsonage, where the witches and ghosts had been holding high revel.
She was a brunette with a dark keen eye and hair of jet. Her face was
lovely, save when distorted by passion, and her form was faultless.

"Sarah Williams, where have you been, that we have seen nothing of you
for a fortnight?" asked Mrs. Parris as the visitor entered the house.

"I have been to Boston, and but just came back yesterday. What strange
things have been transpiring since I left?"

At this moment a door opened and Mr. Parris, a tall, pale man, entered
from his study. The new-comer, without waiting for the pastor's wife to
answer her question, rose and, grasping the hand of her spiritual
adviser, cried:

"Mr. Parris, how pale you are! but then I cannot wonder at it, when I
consider all I have heard."

"What have you heard, Sarah?" he asked.

"I have heard you are having trouble in your congregation."

"Who told you?"

"The rumor has gone all over the country, even reaching Boston. And they
do say that the evil spirits have visited Salem to defame you."

Mr. Parris pressed his thin lips so firmly that the blood seemed to have
utterly forsaken them, and his cold gray eye was kindled with a subdued
fire, as he answered:

"I am far from insensible that at this extraordinary time of the devil
coming down in great wrath upon us, there are too many tongues and
hearts thereby set on fire of hell."

"To whom can you trace your troubles?"

"To Goodwife Nurse," answered the pastor. "It is that firebrand of hell
who seeks to ruin me."

"I saw Goody Nurse," cried one of the smaller children.

"When?" asked Mr. Parris.

"Last night."

The pastor, the visitor, and the wife exchanged significant glances, and
the father asked:

"Where did you see her?"

"She came with the black man to my bed."

"What did she do?"

"She asked me to sign the book."

"What book?"

"I don't know; but it was a red book."

The anxious mother, in a fit of hysterics, seized her child in her arms
and cried:

"No, no, no! don't you sign the book an