orce the next day at the adjourned session.
When he was brought in, they fell at once into the most grievous fits
and screechings.

"Who hurts you?" was asked, after they had recovered somewhat.

"This man," said Abigail Williams, going off into another fit.

"This is the man," averred Ann Putnam; "he hurts me, and wants me to
write in the red book; and promises if I will do so, to make me as well
as his grand-daughter."

"Yes, this is the man," cried Mercy Lewis, "he almost kills me."

"It is the one who used to come to me. I know him by his two staffs,
with one of which he used to beat the life out of me," said Mary
Walcott.

Mercy Lewis for her part walked towards him; but as soon as she got
near, fell into great fits.

Then Ann Putnam and Abigail Williams "had each of them a pin stuck in
their hands and they said it was done by this old Jacobs."

The Magistrates took all this wicked acting in sober earnest; and asked
the prisoner, "what he had to say to it?"

"Only that it is false," he replied. "I know no more of it than the
child that was born last night."

But the honest old man's denial went of course, for nothing. Neither did
Sarah Ingersoll's deposition made a short time afterwards; in which she
testified that "Sarah Churchill came to her after giving her evidence,
crying and wringing her hands, and saying that she has belied herself
and others in saying she had set her hand to the Devil's book." She said
that "they had threatened her that if she did not say it, they would put
her in the dungeon along with Master Burroughs."

And that, "if she told Master Noyes, the minister, but once that she had
set her hand to the book, he would believe her; but if she told him the
truth a hundred times, he would not believe her."

The truth no doubt is that Master Noyes, Master Parris, Cotton Mather,
and all the other ministers, with one or two exceptions, having
committed themselves fully to the prosecution of the witches, would
listen to nothing that tended to prove that the principal witnesses were
deliberate and malicious liars; and that, so far as the other witnesses
were concerned, they were grossly superstitious and deluded persons.

No charity that is fairly clear-sighted, can cover over the evidence of
the "afflicted circle" with the mantle of self-delusion. Self-delusion
does not conceal pins, stick them into its own body, and charge the
accused person with doing it, knowing that the accusation may