hanged. And on the twentysecond of September, two men and six women were hanged. Eight more were condemned, but this was the last execution. One man refusing to put himself on trial was pressed to death agreeably to the provisions of the English law.

The principal immediate effect of these summary and sanguinary proceedings was to render the accusers more bold, confident and daring; they began to feel that the lives of all the people were in their hands, and seemed at last to have experienced a fiendlike satisfaction in the thought of bringing infamy and death upon the best and most honored citizens of the colony; they repeatedly cried out upon the Rev. Mr Willard, before mentioned, the author of the Body of Divinity,' one of the most revered and beloved ministers of the times. They accused a member of the immediate family of Dr Increase Mather, who had recently returned from a special embassy to the English court respecting the charter, and was then the President of Harvard College-the man whom Elliott calls the father of the New England clergy,'

- and whose name and character have been held in veneration by his contemporaries and all succeeding generations. A writer of that period intimates that they accused the wife of the Governor, Sir William Phipps; they even went so far, it is said, as to implicate one of the Judges of the court.

But that which finally overthrew their power and broke the spell by which they had held the minds of the whole colony in bondage, was their accusation of Mrs Hale, the wife of the minister of the first church in Beverly. Her genuine and distinguished virtues had won for her a reputation, and secured in the hearts of the people a confidence, which superstition itself could not sully nor shake. Mr Hale had been active in all the previous proceedings; but he knew the innocence and piety of his wife, and he stood forth between her and the storm he had helped to raise; although he had driven it on while others were its victims, he turned and resisted it, when it burst in upon his own dwelling. In crying out upon Mrs Hale, the whole community was convinced

that the accusers had perjured themselves, and from that moment their power was destroyed; the awful delusion ceased; the curtain fell, and a close was put to one of the most tremendous tragedies in the history of real life. The wildest storm, perhaps, that ever raged in the moral world, instantly became a calm; the tide that had threatened to overwhelm everything in its fury, sunk back in a moment to its peaceful bed. There are few, if any other, instances in history, of a revolution of opinion and feeling, so sudden, so rapid, and so complete. The images and visions that had possessed the bewildered imaginations of the people, flitted away and left them standing in the clear sunshine of reason, and their senses, and they could have exclaimed, as they witnessed them passing off, in the language of the great master of the drama, and of human nature, but that their rigid puritan principles, would not, it is presumed, have permitted them, even in that moment of rescue and deliverance, to quote Shakspeare

The earth has bubbles, as the waters have,

And these are some of them: they vanished
Into the air, and what seemed corporal,
Melted as breath into the wind.'

During the prevalence of this fanaticism, twenty persons lost their lives by the hand of the executioner. As they died innocent of the crime imputed to them, and maintained their integrity to the last, preferring to suffer an ignominious and horrible death, rather than increase the delusion of the times, by feigning a confession in order to save their lives, it will be proper to recall their names from oblivion, and while we reverse the sentence that was passed upon them, pay them our tribute of respect for their firmness and veracity, and of pity for their dreadful sufferings and fate. I shall mention the places of their usual residence, in order to shew how the delusion pervaded the country.

Rev. George Burroughs of Wells, Samuel Wardwell of Andover, Wilmot Reed of Marblehead, Margaret Scott of Rowley, Susanna Martin of Amesbury, Elizabeth How of Ipswich, Sarah Wildes and Mary Easty of Topsfield, Martha Carrier and Mary Par

ker of Andover, John Proctor, John Willard, Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse and Martha Cory of Salem Village, George Jacobs, Jr, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeater, Bridget Bishop, alias Oliver, of Salem. Giles Cory of Salem was pressed to death. Most of these persons were advanced in years, and many of them left large families of children. The following were condemned to death but did not suffer: Abigail Faulkner, Mary Lacy and Ann Foster of Andover, Dorcas Hoar of Beverly, Mary Bradbury of Salisbury, Rebecca Eames of Boxford, Abigail Hobbs of Topsfield, and Elizabeth Proctor of Salem Village. Besides these, fiftyfive persons escaped death by confessing themselves guilty, one hundred and fifty were in prison, and more than two hundred others accused.

One adventurous and noble spirited young man found means to effect his mother's escape from confinement, fled with her on horseback from the vicinity of the jail, and secreted her in the Blueberry Swamp, not far from Tapley's brook in the Great Pasture; he protected her concealment there