aged by foolish
parents, and drawn out by superstitious neighbours, were sufficient to set
a country in a flame. If, instead of commissioners as deeply sunk in the
slough of ignorance as the people they were sent amongst, there had been
deputed a few men firm in courage and clear in understanding, how
different would have been the result! Some of the poor children who were
burned would have been sent to an infirmary; others would have been well
flogged; the credulity of the parents would have been laughed at; and the
lives of seventy persons spared. The belief in witchcraft remains in
Sweden to this day; but happily the annals of that country present no more
such instances of lamentable aberration of intellect as the one just
cited.

In New England, about the same time, the colonists were scared by similar
stories of the antics of the devil. All at once a fear seized upon the
multitude, and supposed criminals were arrested day after day in such
numbers, that the prisons were found too small to contain them. A girl
named Goodwin, the daughter of a mason, who was hypochondriac and subject
to fits, imagined that an old Irish woman, named Glover, had bewitched
her. Her two brothers, in whose constitutions there was apparently a
predisposition to similar fits, went off in the same way, crying out that
the devil and Dame Glover were tormenting them. At times their joints were
so stiff that they could not be moved; while at others, said the
neighbours, they were so flexible, that the bones appeared softened into
sinews. The supposed witch was seized, and as she could not repeat the
Lord's Prayer without making a mistake in it, she was condemned and
executed.

But the popular excitement was not allayed. One victim was not enough; the
people waited agape for new disclosures. Suddenly two hysteric girls in
another family fell into fits daily, and the cry of witchcraft resounded
from one end of the colony to the other. The feeling of suffocation in the
throat, so common in cases of hysteria, was said by the patients to be
caused by the devil himself, who had stuck balls in the windpipe to choke
them. They felt the pricking of thorns in every part of the body, and one
of them vomited needles. The case of these girls, who were the daughter
and niece of a Mr. Parvis, the minister of a Calvinist chapel, excited so
much attention, that all the weak women in the colony began to fancy
themselves similarly afflicted. The more they broode