el keeping
Children from Wickedness--Witches on a Minister's
Head--Witch assaulting another Minister--Witches'
Imps--Butter of Witches--The Devil described--How
Witches are punished--Horse burned on account of being
supposed to be an Agent of Satan.

When Scotchmen and Englishmen went out first to inhabit America, they
did not forget the superstitions of their native land. A belief in
charms, incantations, and all kinds of witchcraft prevailed among the
earlier settlers of the United States and Canada. From sire to son,
and from mother to daughter, a belief in mysterious agencies has come
down to the existing inhabitants of the transatlantic States. It may
be that the inhabitants of large cities in the West have forgotten the
traditions of their ancestors respecting things supernatural, but
every observant American traveller knows that the burning embers of
superstition have not expired in the back settlements of that vast
country. Trials of persons accused of witchcraft were not unfrequent
in New England in the seventeenth century. The Rev. Cotton Mather has
written an account of proceedings connected with such cases, but want
of space prevents us following him at great length. He says:

"We have now, with horror, seen the discovery of a
great witchcraft. An army of devils has broken in upon
this place, which is the centre, and, after a sort,
the first-born of our English settlements; and the
houses of the good people there are filled with the
doleful shrieks of their children and servants
tormented by invisible hands, with tortures altogether
preternatural. After the mischiefs there endeavoured,
and since in part conquered, the terrible plague of
evil angels hath made its progress into some other
places, where other persons have in like manner been
diabolically handled.

"These, our poor afflicted neighbours, quickly, after
they become infected and infested with these demons,
arrive to a capacity of discerning those which they
conceive the shapes of their troubles; and
notwithstanding the great and just suspicion that the
demons might impose the shape of innocent persons in
their spectral exhibitions of the sufferers, (which
may perhaps prove no small part of the witch-plot in
the issue), yet many of the persons thus represented
being examined, sever