reading on the mysterious
subject, "cried out upon her," as the phrase was, as a witch, and
proceeded to act the part understood to be fit for a bewitched person;
in which behavior she was presently joined by three others of the
circle, one of them only four or five years old. Now they would lose
their hearing, now their sight, now their speech; and sometimes all
three faculties at once. They mewed like kittens; they barked like
dogs.

Cotton Mather prayed with one of them; but she lost her hearing, he
says, when he began, and recovered it as soon as he finished. Four
Boston ministers and one of Charlestown held a meeting, and passed a
day in fasting and prayer, by which exorcism the youngest imp was
"delivered." The poor woman, crazed with all this pother,--if in her
right mind before,--and defending herself unskilfully in her foreign
gibberish and with the volubility of her race, was interpreted as
making some confession. A gossiping witness testified that six years
before she had heard another woman say that she had seen the accused
come down a chimney. She was required to repeat the Lord's Prayer in
English,--an approved test; but being a Catholic, she had never
learned it in that language. She could recite it, after a fashion, in
Latin; but she was no scholar, and made some mistakes. The helpless
wretch was convicted and sent to the gallows.

Cotton Mather took the oldest "afflicted" girl to his house, where she
dexterously played upon his self-conceit to stimulate his credulity.
She satisfied him that Satan regarded him as his most terrible enemy,
and avoided him with especial awe. When he prayed or read in the
Bible, she was seized with convulsion fits. When he called to family
devotion she would whistle, and sing, and scream, and pretend to try
to strike and kick him; but her blows would be stopt before reaching
his body, indicating that he was unassailable by the Evil One. Mather
published an account of these transactions,[3] with a collection of
other appropriate matter. The treatise circulated not only in
Massachusetts, but widely also in England, where it obtained the warm
commendation of Richard Baxter; and it may be supposed to have had an
important effect in producing the more disastrous delusion which
followed three years after. The Goodwin children soon got well: in
other words, they were tired of their atrocious foolery; and the death
of their victim gave them a pretense for a return to decent
behav