The traveller of to-day, in passing over Crane-river Bridge, approaching the present village of “The Plains,” near the eastern end of the Townsend Bishop or Nurse farm, will notice a roadway by the side of the bridge descending through the brook and going up to rejoin the main road on the other side.  Such turnouts are frequent by the side of bridges over small streams.  They are refreshing and useful, cooling the feet and cleansing the fetlocks of horses, and washing the wheels of carriages.  One afternoon, Edward Bishop, with his wife behind him on a pillion, was riding home from Salem.  Two women, mounted in the same way, joined them; and they chatted together pleasantly as their horses ambled along.  When they came to the bridge, Bishop, probably merely for the fun of the thing, dashed down into the brook, instead of going over the bridge, to the great consternation and against the vehement remonstrances of his wife, who berated him soundly for his reckless disregard of her safety.  They got through without accident; and the four jogged on together until the Bishops turned up to their house, and the other two kept on to their home in Beverly.  But all the way from the bridge, until they parted company, Bishop was finding great fault with his wife, saying that he should not have been sorry if any mishap had occurred.  She did not say much after her first fright and resentment were over; but he kept on talking very freely about her, and using some pretty hard language.  This affair, which perhaps is not without a parallel in the occasional experiences of married life, was, with other things of an equally trivial and irrelevant character, brought to bear fatally against her at her trial on the charge of witchcraft, between seven and eight years afterward.

I can find no evidence against the moral character of this woman.  One person, at least, who participated largely in getting up accusations against her, acknowledged, in a death-bed repentance, the wrong she had done.  Mr. Hale, the minister of the Beverly congregation, states, in a deposition, that a certain woman, “being in full communion in our church, came to me to desire that Goodwife Bishop, her neighbor, wife of Edward Bishop, Jr., might not be permitted to receive the Lord’s Supper in our church till she had given her satisfaction for some offences that were against her; namely, because the said Bishop did entertain people in her house at unseasonable hours in the night, to keep drinking and playing at shovel-board, whereby discord did arise in other families, and young people were in danger to be corrupted; that she knew these things, and had once gone into the house, and, finding some at shovel-board, had taken the pieces they played with and thrown them into the fire, and had reproved the said Bishop for promoting such disorders, but received no satisfaction from her about it.”  According to Mr. Hale’s statement, the night after this complaint was brought to him, the woman