“so strangely distorted, that it was an extreme difficulty to drag her up stairs.  The demons would pull her out of the people’s hands, and make her heavier than, perhaps, three of herself.  With incredible toil (though she kept screaming, ’They say I must not go in’), she was pulled in; where she was no sooner got, but she could stand on her feet, and, with altered note, say, ‘Now I am well.’  She would be faint at first, and say ‘she felt something to go out of her’ (the noises whereof we sometimes heard like those of a mouse); but, in a minute or two, she could apply herself to devotion.  To satisfy some strangers, the experiment was, divers times, with the same success, repeated, until my lothness to have any thing done like making a charm of a room, caused me to forbid the repetition of it.”

Even in her most riotous proceedings, she kept her eye fixed upon the doctor’s weak point.  When he called the family to prayers, she would whistle and sing and yell to drown his voice, would strike him with her fist, and try to kick him.  But her hand or foot would always recoil when within an inch or two of his body; thus giving the idea that there was a sort of invisible coat of mail, of heavenly temper, and proof against the assaults of the Devil, around his sacred person!  After a while, Dr. Mather concluded to prepare an account of these extraordinary circumstances, wherewithal to entertain his congregation in a sermon.  She seemed to be quite displeased at the thought of his making public the doings of her master, the Evil One, attempted to prevent his writing the intended sermon, and disturbed and interrupted him in all manner of ways.  For instance, she once knocked at his study door, and said that “there was somebody down stairs that would be glad to see him.”  He dropped his pen, and went down.  Upon entering the room, he found nobody there but the family.  The next time he met her, he undertook to chide her for having told him a falsehood.  She denied that she had told a falsehood.  “Didn’t you say,” said he, “that there was somebody down stairs that would be glad to see me?”—­“Well,” she replied, with inimitable pertness, “is not Mrs. Mather always glad to see you?”

She even went much farther than this in persecuting the good man while he was writing his sermon:  she threw large books at his head.  But he struggled manfully against these buffetings of Satan, as he considered her conduct to be, finished the sermon, related all these circumstances in it, preached, and published it.  Richard Baxter wrote the preface to an edition printed in London, in which he declares that he who will not be convinced by all the evidence Dr. Mather presents that the child was bewitched “must be a very obdurate Sadducee.”  It is so obvious, that, in this whole affair, Cotton Mather was grossly deceived and audaciously imposed upon by the most consummate and precocious cunning, that it needs no comment.  I have given this particular account of it, because there is reason to believe that it originated the delusion in Salem.  It occurred only four years before.  Dr. Mather’s account of the transaction filled the whole country; and it is probable that the children in Mr. Parris’s family undertook to re-enact it.