He was interrupted by great noises and shrieks that were enough to raise the dead—noises from every part of the grave-yard—shrieks from people afar off in the wood, shrieks from the multitude on the outside of the house—and shrieks from the sea-shore; and immediately certain of the accusers fell down as if they saw something approach; and several that were on the outside of the meeting-house came rushing in with a fearful outcry, saying that a shed which had been built up over a part of the burial-ground was crowded with strange faces, and with awful shapes, and that among them were the two dead wives of the prisoner.
There they go—there they go! screamed other voices outside the door; and immediately the cry was repeated by the accusers who were within the house—all shrieking together. “Here they come!—here they come!—here they come!”—And Judith Hubbard looking up and uncovering her face, about which her cloak had been gathered in the first hurry of her distraction, declared that the last wife of Burroughs, on whom her eyes were fixed at the time, was then actually standing before him and looking him in the face, “O, with such a look—so calm, so piteous and so terrible!”
After the uproar had abated in some degree, the judges who were huddled together, as far as they could possibly get from the crowd below, ordered up three more of the witnesses, and were about to speak to them, when Burroughs happening to turn that way also, they cried out as if they were stabbed with a knife, and fell upon the floor at their whole length and were speechless.
Whereupon the chief judge, turning toward him, asked him what hindered these poor people from giving their testimony.
I do not know said Burroughs, who began to give way himself now, with a convulsion of the heart, before the tremendous array of testimony and weight of delusion; to fear that of a truth preternatural shapes were about him, and that the witnesses were over-persuaded by irresistible power, though he knew himself to be no party in the exercise of such power. I do not know, said he: I am utterly confounded by their behaviour. It may be the devil.
Ah—and why is the devil so loath to have testimony borne against you?
“Which query,” says a writer who was there at the time, and saw the look of triumph which appeared in the faces of the whole bench, “did cast Burroughs into very great confusion.”
And well it might, for he was weighed to the earth, and he knew that whatever he said, and whatever he did; and whether he spoke with promptitude or with hesitation; whether he showed or did not show a sign of dismay, everything would be, and was regarded by the judges, and the jury, and the people, as further corroboration of his turpitude.
Here the trial ended. Here the minds of the jury were made up; and although he grew collected at last, and arose and spoke in a way that made everybody about him weep and very bitterly too, for what they called the overthrow of a mind of great wisdom and beauty and power; and although he gave up to the judges a written argument of amazing ingenuity and vigor which is yet preserved in the records of that people, wherein he mocked at their faith in witchcraft, and foretold the grief and the shame, the trouble and the reproach that were to follow to them that were so busy in the work of death; yet—yet—so impressed were the twelve, by the scene that had occurred before their faces, that they found him guilty; and as if the judges were afraid of a rescue from the powers of the air, they gave judgment of death upon him before they left the bench, and contrary to their established practice, ordered him to be executed on the morrow.
On the morrow? said he, with a firm steady eye and a clear tone, though his lip quivered as he spoke. Will ye afford me no time to prepare?