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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 sup-
ple 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 some words which she had forgotten. She was
therefore supposed to be unable to pronounce the whole consistently and correctly, and con-
demned 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 pos-
session. Some of these were excellently calculated to flatter the self-opinion and prejudices of
the Calvinist ministers 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 impediment; but the which possessed her
threw her into fits if she attempted to read the same Scriptures 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 singu-
lar species of flattery was designed to captivate the clergyman through his professional opin-
ions; 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 upstairs, 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 minis-
ter, 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 former violence. She used to break in upon him at his studies to importune him to
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come downstairs, and thus advantaged doubtless the kingdom of Satan by the interruption of
his pursuits. At length the Goodwins were, or appeared to be, cured. But the example had
been given and caught, and the blood of poor Dame Glover, which had been the introduction
to this tale of a hobby-horse, was to be the forerunner of new atrocities and fearfully more
general follies.
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, endeavour-
ing, 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 the condemnation of the Indian woman Titu, became
generally fatal. The afflicted persons failed not to see the spectres, as they were termed, of
the persons by whom they were tormented. Against this species of evidence no alibi could be
offered, because it was admitted, as we have said elsewhere, that the real persons of the
accused were not there present; and everything rested upon the assumption that the afflicted
persons were telling the truth, since their evidence could not be redargued. These spectres
were generally represented as offering their victims a book, on signing which they would be
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