CHAPTER VII.
Meanwhile other charges grew up, and there was a dread everywhere throughout the whole country, a deep fear in the hearts and a heavy mysterious fear in the blood of men. The judges were in array against the people, and the people against each other; and the number of the afflicted increased every day and every hour, and they were sent for from all parts of the Colony. Fasting and prayer preceded their steps, and whithersoever they went, witches and wizards were sure to be discovered. A native theologian, a very pious and very learned writer of that day, was employed by the authorities of New England to draw up a detailed account of what he himself was an eye witness of; and he says of the unhappy creatures who appeared to be bewitched, all of whom he knew, and most of whom he saw every day of his life, that when the fit was on, they were distorted and convulsed in every limb, that they were pinched black and blue by invisible fingers, that pins were stuck into their flesh by invisible hands, that they were scalded in their sleep as with boiling water and blistered as with fire, that one of the afflicted was beset by a spectre with a spindle that nobody else could see, till in her agony she snatched it away from the shape, when it became instantly visible to everybody in the room with a quick flash, that another was haunted by a shape clothed in a white sheet which none but the afflicted herself was able to see till she tore a piece of it away, whereupon it grew visible to others about her, (it was of this particular story that Sarah Good spoke just before she was turned off) that they were pursued night and day by withered hands—little outstretched groping hands with no bodies nor arms to them, that cups of blue fire and white smoke of a grateful smell, were offered them to drink while they were in bed, of which, if they tasted ever so little, as they would sometimes in their fright and hurry, their bodies would swell up and their flesh would grow livid, much as if they had been bit by a rattle snake, that burning rags were forced into their mouths or under their armpits, leaving sores that no medicine would cure, that some were branded as with a hot iron, so that very deep marks were left upon their foreheads for life, that the spectres generally personated such as were known to the afflicted, and that whenever they did so, if the shape or spectre was hurt by the afflicted, the person represented by the shape was sure to be hurt in the same way, that, for example, one of the afflicted having charged a woman of Beverly, Dorcas Hoare, with tormenting her, and immediately afterwards, pointing to a far part of the room, cried out, there!—there! there she goes now! a man who stood near, drew his rapier and struck at the wall, whereupon the accuser told the court he had given the shape a scratch over the right eye; and that Dorcas Hoare being apprehended a few days thereafter, it was found that she had a mark over the right eye, which after a while she confessed had been given her by the rapier; that if the accused threw a look at the witnesses, the latter, though their eyes were turned another way, would know it, and fall into a trance, out of which they would recover only at the touch of the accused, that oftentimes the flesh of the afflicted was bitten with a peculiar set of teeth corresponding precisely with the teeth of the accused, whether few or many, large or small, broken or regular, and that after a while, the afflicted were often able to see the shapes that tormented them, and among the rest a swarthy devil of a diminutive stature, with fierce bright eyes, who carried a book in which he kept urging them to write, whereby they would have submitted themselves to the power and authority of another Black Shape, with which, if they were to be believed on their oaths, two or three of their number had slept.
In reply to these reputed facts however, which appear in the grave elaborate chronicles of the church, and are fortified by other facts which were testified to about the same time, in the mother country, we have the word of George Burroughs, a minister of God, who met the accusers at the time, and stood up to them face to face, and denied the truth of their charges, and braved the whole power of them that others were so afraid of.
Man! man! away with her to the place of death! cried he to the chief judge, on hearing a beautiful woman with a babe at her breast, a wife and a mother acknowledge that she had lain with Beelzebub. Away with her! why do you let her live! why permit her to profane the House of the Lord, where the righteous are now gathered together, as ye believe? why do ye spare the few that confess—would ye bribe them to live? Would ye teach them to swear away the lives and characters of all whom they are afraid of? and thus to preserve their own? Look there!—that is her child—her only child—the babe that you see there in the lap of that aged woman—she has no other hope in this world, nothing to love, nothing to care for but that babe, the man-child of her beauty. Ye are fathers!—look at her streaming eyes, at her locked hands, at her pale quivering mouth, at her dishevelled hair—can you wonder now at anything she says to save her boy—for if she dies, he dies? A wife and a mother! a broken-hearted wife and a young mother accused of what, if she did not speak as you have now made her speak, would separate her and her baby forever and ever!
Would you have us put her to death? asked one of the judges. You appear to argue in a strange way. What is your motive?—What your hope?—What would you have us do? suffer them to escape who will not confess, and put all to death who do?
Even so.
Why—if you were in league with the Evil One yourself brother George, I do not well see how you could hit upon a method more advantageous for him.
Hear me—I would rather die myself, unfitted as I am for death, die by the rope, while striving to stay the mischief-makers in their headlong career, than be the cause of death to such a woman as that, pleading before you though she be, with perjury; because of a truth she is pleading, not so much against life as for life, not so much against the poor old creature whom she accuses of leading her astray, as for the babe that you see there; for that boy and for its mother who is quite sure that if she die, the boy will die—I say that which is true, fathers! and yet I swear to you by the—
Thirteen-pence to you, brother B. for that!
—By the God of Abraham, that if her life—