es. "Is it time for o be sleeping, when rdered on his own used, they hurried and heard throughwer there was a place n, the shouts of the t of the muskets, the ded, and the groans their perfect knowce accessible cliffs y dwelt, they were observation, and access of the glen. work of death proHe remorse as Stair desired. Even the their orders respectenty years was disliery in their indisblood, and several

very aged and bedridden persons were slain amongst others. At the hamlet where Glenlyon had his own quarters, nine men, including his landlord, were bound and shot like felons; and one of them, M'Donald of Auchintriaten, had General Hill's passport in his pocket at the time. A fine lad of twenty had, by some glimpse of compassion on the part of the soldiers, been spared, when one Captain Drummond came up, and demanding why the orders were transgressed in that particular, caused him instantly to be put to death. A boy of five or six years old clung to Glenlyon's knees, entreating for mercy, and offering to become his servant for life, if he would spare him. Glenlyon was moved; but the same Drummond stabbed the child with his dirk, while he was in this agony of supplication."

NEW ENGLAND, as is well known, was peopled mainly by emigrants who had been disgusted with the government of Charles I. in Church and State, previous to the great Civil War. Many of the more wealthy settlers were Presbyterians and Calvinists; others, fewer in number and less influential from their fortune, were Quakers, Anabaptists, or members of the other sects who were included under the general name of Independents. The Calvinists brought with them the same zeal for religion and strict morality which everywhere distinguished them. Unfortunately they were not wise according to their zeal, but entertained a proneness to believe in supernatural and direct personal intercourse between the devil and his vassals, an error to which, as we have endeavoured to show, their brethren in Europe had, from the beginning, been peculiarly subject. In a country imperfectly cultivated, and where the partially improved spots were embosomed in inaccessible forests, inhabited by numer

ous tribes of savages, it was natural that a disposition to superstition should rather gain than lose ground, and chat to other dangers and horrors with which they were surrounded the colonists should have added fears of the devil, not merely as the evil principle tempting human nature to sin and thus endangering our salvation, but as combined with sorcerers and witches to inflict death and torture upon children and others.

The first case, which I observe, was that of four children of a person called John Goodwin, a mason. The eldest, a girl, had quarrelled with the laundress of the family about some linen which was amissing. The mother of the laundress, an ignorant, testy, and choleric old Irishwoman, scolded the accuser ; and shortly after the elder Goodwin, her sister and two brothers, were seized with such strange diseases, that all their neighbours concluded they were bewitched. They conducted themselves as those supposed to suffer under maladies created by such influence were

accustomed to do.

They stiffened their necks so hard at one time that the joints could not be moved; at another time their necks were so flexible and supple, that it seemed the bone was dissolved. They had violent convulsions, in which their jaws snapped with the force of a spring-trap set for vermin. Their limbs were curiously contorted, and to those who had a taste for the marvellous, seemed entirely dislocated and displaced. Amid these distortions they cried out against the poor old woman, whose name was Glover, alleging that she was in presence with them adding to their torments. The miserable Irishwoman, who hardly could speak the English language, repeated her Pater Noster and Ave Maria like a good Catholic, but there were words which she had forgotten. She was therefore supposed to be unable to pronounce the whole con

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1 An American historian gives the following account of the clergyman who was most to blame in encouraging this extraordinary delusion: There was at this time at Boston a young clergyman, an indefatigable student, remarkable for his memory and for the immense amount of verbal knowledge he possessed; he was withal somewhat vain and credulous, and exceedingly fond of the marvellous; no theory seems to have been more deeply rooted in his mind than a belief in witchcraft. Such was Cotton Mather, son of Increase Mather. He became deeply interested in the case of the Goodwin children, and began to study the subject with renewed zeal; to do so the more perfectly, he took the girl to his home. She was cunning, and soon discovered the weak points of his character. She told him he was under a special

sistently and correctly, and condemned and executed accordingly.

But the children of Goodwin found the trade they were engaged in to be too profitable to be laid aside, and the eldest in particular continued all the external signs of witchcraft and possession. Some of these were excellently calculated to flatter the self-opinion and prejudices of the Calvinist ministers 1 by whom she was attended, and accordingly bear in their very front the character of studied and voluntary imposture. The young woman, acting, as was supposed, under the influence of the devil, read a Quaker treatise with ease and apparent satisfaction; but a book written against the poor inoffensive Friends, the devil would not allow his victim to touch. She could look on a Church of England prayer-book and read the portions of Scripture which it contains without difficulty or impediprotection: that devils, though they tried hard, could not enter his study; that they could not strike him; the blows were warded off by an invisible friendly hand. Mather uttered prayers in a variety of languages, to ascertain if these wicked spirits were learned. He discovered that they were skilled in Latin, and Greek, and Hebrew, but deficient in some Indian tongues. He sincerely believed all this, and wrote a book, a story all made up of wonders,' to prove the truth of witchcraft, and gave out that hereafter, if any one should deny its existence, he should consider it a personal insult. Mather's book was republished in London, with an approving preface written by Richard Baxter. This book had its influence upon the minds of the people, and prepared the way for the sad scenes which followed."

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ment; but the spirit which possessed her, threw her into fits if she attempted to read the same scripture from the Bible, as if the awe which it is supposed the fiends entertain for holy writ, depended, not on the meaning of the words, but the arrangement of the page and the type in which they were printed. This singular species of flattery was designed to captivate the clergyman through his professional opinions; others were more strictly personal. The afflicted damsel seems to have been somewhat of the humour of the inamorata of Messrs. Smack, Pluck, Catch, and Company, and had, like her, merry as well as melancholy fits. She often imagined that her attendant spirits brought her a handsome pony to ride off with them to their rendezvous. On such occasions she made a spring upwards as if to mount her horse, and then, still seated on her chair, mimicked with dexterity and agility the motions of the animal pacing, trotting, and galloping, like a child on the nurse's knee; but when she cantered in this manner up-stairs, she affected inability to enter the clergyman's study, and when she was pulled into it by force, used to become quite well, and stand up as a rational being. "Reasons were given for this," says the simple | minister, "that seem more kind than true." Shortly after this she appears to have treated the poor divine with a species of sweetness and attention, which gave him greater embarrassment than her

This scene opened by the illness of two girls, a daughter and niece of Mr. Parvis, the minister of Salem, who fell under an affliction similar to that of the Goodwins. Their mouths were stopped, their throats choked, their limbs racked, thorns were stuck into their flesh, and pins were ejected from their stomachs. An Indian and his wife, servants of the family, endeavouring, by some spell of their own, to discover by whom the fatal charm had been imposed on their master's children, drew themselves under suspicion, and were hanged. The judges and juries persevered, encouraged by the discovery of these poor Indians' guilt, and hoping they might thus expel from the colony the authors of such practices. They acted, says Mather, the historian, under a conscientious wish to do justly; but the cases of witchcraft and possession increased as if they were transmitted by contagion, and the same sort of spectral evidence being received, which had occasioned