replied, “The timber now and here cut down has been felled by me and my orders;” and he proceeded to say, “I will keep cutting and carrying away from this land until next March.”  They asked him, “What, by violence?” He answered, “Aye, by violence.  You may sue me:  you know where I dwell;” and, turning to his company, he said, “Fall on.”  The Putnams were evidently the stronger party; and the Topsfield men, counting forces, concluded, in their turn, that discretion, at that time, was the better part of valor.  Such scenes occurred on the disputed ground for a whole generation.  It is not wonderful that all sorts of animosities were kindled.  The fact will be borne in mind, that Isaac Easty and son, with John Towne and son, constituted the Topsfield force on this occasion.

It cannot be doubted, that these controversies with the surrounding towns, the mother-church, and the General Court itself, gradually engendered a very bad state of feeling.  The people were deeply impressed with a conviction that they had been wronged all around and all the way through.  They felt that the whole world was against them; and when, by a train of mischievous influences, hell itself seemed to be let loose upon them, it is not strange that they were driven to distraction.

We come, at last, to that chapter in the history of Salem Village which will lead us directly to the witchcraft delusion.  Its religious organization was somewhat peculiar; and, although instituted by a particular arrangement made by the General Court, was, in one or two features, a complete departure from the ecclesiastical polity elsewhere rigidly enforced.  It was a congregation forbidden, for the time being, to have a church.  It was a society for religious worship, administered, not by professors of religion or by persons regarded at all in a religious light, but by householders.  The people of the village liked it, perhaps, all the better for this; and they took hold of it with a will.  Joseph Houlton gave to the parish five and a half acres of land, in the centre of the village, for the use of the minister.  A parsonage-house was built, “forty-two feet in length, twenty feet broad, thirteen-feet stud, four chimneys, and no gable-ends.”  It was the custom to have a leanto attached to their houses, generally on the northern side; and one was finally added to the parsonage.  There was a garden within the enclosure.  Joseph Hutchinson gave an acre out of his broad meadow as a site for the meeting-house and it was erected; “thirty-four feet in length, twenty-eight feet broad, and sixteen feet between joints.”  Two end galleries were added, and a “canopy” placed over the pulpit.  The mother-church, having about the same time built a new meeting-house, voted to give “the farmers their old pulpit and deacons’ seats,” which were brought up and duly installed.  In the course of these proceedings, some slight differences arose among them about matters of detail, but not more than is usual in such cases.  In order to