g; a hundred and fifty were in prison awaiting
trial; and charges had been made against two hundred more. The
accusers were now flying at high quarries. Hezekiah Usher, known to
the reader as an ancient magistrate of fair consideration, was
complained of; and Mrs. Thacher, mother-in-law of Corwin, the justice
who had taken the earliest examinations. Zeal in pushing forward the
prosecution began to seem dangerous; for what was to prevent an
accused person from securing himself by confession, and then revenging
himself on the accuser by arraigning him as a former ally?...

The drunken fever-fit was now over, and with returning sobriety came
profound contrition and disgust. A few still held out against the
return of reason. There are some men who never own that they have been
in the wrong, and a few men who are forever incapable of seeing it.
Stoughton, with his bull-dog stubbornness, that might in other times
have made him a St. Dominic, continued to insist that the business had
been all right, and that the only mistake was in putting a stop to it.
Cotton Mather was always infallible in his own eyes. In the year after
the executions he had the satisfaction of studying another remarkable
case of possession in Boston; but when it and the treatise which he
wrote upon it failed to excite much attention, and it was plain that
the tide had set the other way, he soon got his consent to let it run
at its own pleasure, and turned his excursive activity to other
objects....

Members of some of the juries, in a written public declaration,
acknowledged the fault of their wrongful verdicts, entreated
forgiveness, and protested that, "according to their present minds,
they would none of them do such things again, on such grounds, for the
whole world; praying that this act of theirs might be accepted in way
of satisfaction for their offense." A day of General Fasting was
proclaimed by authority, to be observed throughout the jurisdiction,
in which the people were invited to pray that "whatever mistakes on
either hand had been fallen into, either by the body of this people,
or by any orders of men, referring to the late tragedy raised among us
by Satan and his instruments, through the awful judgment of God, he
would humble them therefor, and pardon all the errors of his servants
and people."

[1] From Palfrey's "History of New England." By permission of, and
by arrangement with, the authorized publishers, Houghton, Miffin