"Mr. Hathorne desired all the children to stand up, and look upon her, and see if they did know her, which they all did; and every one of them said that this was one of the women that did afflict them, and that they had constantly seen her in the very habit that she was now in. Three evidences declared that she said this morning, that she was more like to be bewitched than that she was a witch. Mr. Hathorne asked her what made her say so. She answered that she was frighted one time in her sleep, and either saw, or dreamed that she saw, a thing like an Indian all black, which did pinch her in her neck, and pulled her by the back part of her head to the door of the house.
"Did you never see any thing else?—No.
"(It was said by some in the meeting-house, that she had said that she would never believe that lying spirit any more.)
"What lying spirit is this? Hath the Devil ever deceived you, and been false to you?—I do not know the Devil. I never did see him.
"What lying spirit was it, then?—It was a voice that I thought I heard.
"What did it propound to you?—That I should go no more to meeting; but I said I would, and did go the next sabbath-day.
"Were you never tempted further?—No.
"Why did you yield thus far to the Devil as never to go to meeting since?—Alas! I have been sick, and not able to go.
"Her husband and others said that she had not been at meeting three years and two months."
The foregoing illustrates the unfairness practised by the examining magistrate. He took for granted, as we shall find to have been the case in all instances, the guilt of the prisoner, and endeavored to entangle her by leading questions, thus involving her in contradiction. By the force of his own assumptions, he had compelled Sarah Good to admit the reality of the sufferings of the girls, and that they must be caused by some one. The amount of what she had said was, that, if caused by one or the other of them, "then it must be Osburn," for she was sure of her own innocence. This expression, to which she was driven in self-exculpation, was perverted by the reporter, Ezekiel Cheever, and by the magistrate, into an indirect confession and a direct accusation of Osburn. In the absence of Good, the magistrate told Osburn that Good had confessed and accused her. This was a misrepresentation of one, and a false and fraudulent trick upon the other. Considering the feeble condition of Sarah Osburn generally, the snares by which she was beset, the distressing and bewildering circumstances in which she was placed, and the infirm state of her reason, as evidenced in her statement of what she saw, or dreamed that she saw and heard,—not having a clear idea which,—her answers, as reported by the prosecutors, show that her broken and disordered mind was essentially truthful and innocent.