e in the persecution; and that wickedness
can only be partly extenuated by the plea of possible insanity or of
demoniacal possession.

[Illustration: Marched from jail for the last time]

The route to the gallows hill was a rough and difficult one; but the
condemned were marched from the jail for the last time, one by one, and
compelled to walk attended by a small guard and a rude and jeering
company. There was Rebecca Nurse, infirm but venerable and lovely, the
beloved mother of a large family; there was the Reverend George
Burroughs, a small dark man, whose great physical strength was enough,
as the Reverend Increase Mather, then President of Harvard College,
said, to prove he was a witch; but who did not believe in infant
baptism, and probably was not up to the orthodox standard of the day in
other respects, though in conduct a very correct and exemplary man;
there was old John Procter, with his two staffs, and long thin white
hair; there was John Willard, a good, innocent young man, lied to death
by Susanna Sheldon, aged eighteen; there was unhappy Martha Carrier four
of whose children, one a girl of eight, had been frightened into
testifying before the Special Court against her; saying that their
mother had taken them to a witch meeting, and that the Devil had
promised her that she should be queen of hell; there was gentle, patient
and saintlike Elizabeth How, with "Father, forgive them!" on her mild
lips; and two others of whom we now know little, save that they were
most falsely and wickedly accused.

There also were the circle of the "afflicted," gazing with hard dry eyes
on the murder they had done and with jeers and scoffs on their thin and
cruel lips.

There, too, were the reverend ministers, Master Parris of Salem village,
and Master Noyes of Salem town, and Master Cotton Mather, who had come
down from Boston in his black clothes, like a buzzard that scents death
and blood a long way off, to lend his spiritual countenance to the
terrible occasion.

Master Noyes, however, the most of the time, seemed rather quiet and
subdued. He was thinking perhaps of Sarah Good's fierce prediction, when
he urged her, as she came up to the gallows to confess, saying to her
that, "she was a witch, and she knew it!" Outraged beyond all endurance
at this last insult at such a moment, Sarah Good cried out: "It is a
lie! I am no more a witch than you are. God will yet give you blood to
drink for this day's cruel work!" Whic