e laid hold on her hand, and, pulling it up to his mouth, he bit
some of her fingers, as he judged into the bone; whereupon she
went from the chamber down stairs out at the door,' &c.

[158] 'Rara avis in terris.' A mongrel and anomalous species
like the German _Meerkatzen_--monkey-cats.

On July 19 five women, and on August 19, six persons, were sent
to the gallows, among whom was Mr. George Burroughs, minister,
who had provoked his judges by questioning the very existence of
witchcraft. At the last moments he so favourably impressed the
assembled spectators by an eloquent address, that Dr. Mather, who
was present, found it necessary to prevent the progress of a
reactionary feeling by asserting that the criminal was no
regularly ordained minister, and the devil has often been
transformed into an angel of light. So transparently iniquitous
and absurd had their mode of procedure become, that one of the
subordinates in the service of the authorities, whose office it
was to arrest the accused, refused to perform any longer his
hateful office, and being himself denounced as an accomplice, he
sought safety in flight. He was captured and executed as a
recusant and wizard. Eight sorcerers suffered the extreme penalty
of the law on September 22. Giles Gory, a few days before,
indignantly refusing to plead, was 'pressed to death,' an
accustomed mode of punishing obstinate prisoners; and in the
course of this torture, it is said, when the tongue of the victim
was forced from his mouth in the agony of pain, the presiding
sheriff forced it back with his cane with much _sang froid_. At
this stage in the proceedings, the magistrates considered that a
justificatory memoir ought to be published for the destruction of
twenty persons of both sexes, and, at the express desire of the
governor, Cotton Mather drew up an Apology in the form of a
treatise, 'More Wonders of the Invisible World,' in which the
Salem, executions are justified by the precedent of similar and
notorious instances in the mother-country, as well as by the
universally accepted doctrines of various eminent authors of all
ages and countries. Increase Mather, Principal of Harvard
College, was also directed to solve the question whether the
devil could sometimes assume the shape of a saint to effect his
particular design. The reverend author resolved it affirmatively
in a learned treatise, which he called (a seeming plagiarism)
'Cases of Conscience concerning Witchc