pressive
personality, and many were her revelations concerning suspected persons
and even totally innocent neighbors. Such workers brought distressing
results, and how often the helpless victims were women! Hear these
echoes from the gloomy court rooms: "September 17: Nine more received
Sentence of Death, viz., Margaret Scot of Rowly, Goodwife Reed of
Marblehead, Samuel Wardwell, and Mary Parker of Andover, also Abigail
Falkner of Andover ... Rebecka Eames of Boxford, Mary Lacy and Ann
Foster of Andover, and Abigail Hobbs of Topsfield. Of these Eight were
Executed."[29] And Cotton Mather in a letter to a friend: "Our Good God
is working of Miracles. Five Witches were lately Executed, impudently
demanding of God a Miraculous Vindication of their Innocency."[30]

And yet how absurd was much of the testimony that led to such wholesale
murder. We have seen some of it already. Note these words by a witness
against Martha Carrier, as presented in Cotton Mather's _Wonders of the
Invisible World_: "The devil carry'd them on a pole to a witch-meeting;
but the pole broke, and she hanging about Carrier's neck, they both
fell down, and she then received an hurt by the fall whereof she was not
at this very time recovered.... This rampant hag, Martha Carrier, was
the person, of whom the confessions of the witches, and of her own
children among the rest, agreed, that the devil had promised her she
should be Queen of Hell."

Here and there a few brave souls dared to protest against the outrage;
but they were exceedingly few. Lady Phipps, wife of the governor, risked
her life by signing a paper for the discharge of a prisoner condemned
for witchcraft. The jailor reluctantly obeyed and lost his position for
allowing the prisoner to go; but in after years the act must have been a
source of genuine consolation to him. Only fear must have restrained the
more thoughtful citizens from similar acts of mercy. Even children were
imprisoned, and so cruelly treated that some lost their reason. In the
_New England History and General Register_ (XXV, 253) is found this
pathetic note: "Dorcas Good, thus sent to prison 'as hale and well as
other children,' lay there seven or eight months, and 'being chain'd in
the dungeon was so hardly used and terrifyed' that eighteen years later
her father alleged 'that she hath ever since been very, chargeable,
haveing little or no reason to govern herself.'"[31]

How many extracts from those old writings might b