It has always been considered strange and unaccountable, that a person of such acknowledged worth as Rebecca Nurse, of infirm health and advanced years, should have been selected among the early victims of the witchcraft prosecutions.  Jealousies and prejudices, such as often infest rural neighborhoods, may have been engendered, in minds open to such influences, by the prosperity and growing influence of her family.  It may be that animosities kindled by the long and violent land controversy, with which many parties had been incidentally connected, lingered in some breasts.  There are decided indications, that the passions awakened by the angry contest between the village and “Topsfield men,” and which the collisions of a half-century had all along exasperated and hardened, may have been concentrated against the Nurses.  Isaac Easty, whose wife was a sister of Rebecca Nurse, and the Townes, who were her brothers or near kinsmen, were the leaders of the Topsfield men.  It is a significant circumstance, in this connection, that to one of the most vehement resolutions passed at meetings of the inhabitants of the village, against the claims of Topsfield, Samuel Nurse, her eldest son, and Thomas Preston, her eldest son-in-law, entered their protest on the record; and, on another similar occasion, her husband Francis Nurse, her son Samuel, and two of her sons-in-law, Preston and Tarbell, took the same course.  So far as the family sided with Topsfield in that controversy, it naturally exposed them to the ill-will of the people of the village.  An analysis of the names and residences of the persons proceeded against, throughout the prosecutions, will show to what an extent hostile motives were supplied from this quarter.  The families of Wildes, How, Hobbs, Towne, Easty, and others who were “cried out” upon by the afflicted children, occupied lands claimed by parties adverse to the village.  What, more than all these causes, was sufficient to create a feeling against the Nurses, is the fact that they were opposed to the party which had existed from the beginning in the parish composed originally of the friends of Bayley.  To crown the whole, when the excitement occasioned by the extraordinary doings in Mr. Parris’s family began to display itself, and the “afflicted children” were brought into notice, the members of this family, with the exception, for a time, of Thomas Preston, discountenanced the whole thing.  They absented themselves from meeting, on account of the disturbances and disorders the girls were allowed to make during the services of worship, in the congregation, on the Lord’s Day.  Unfriendly remarks, from whatever cause, made in the hearing of the girls, provided subjects for them to act upon.  Some persons behind them, suggesting names in this way, whether carelessly or with malicious intent, were guilty of all the misery that was created and blood that was shed.

It became a topic of rumor, that Rebecca Nurse was soon to be brought out.  It reached the ears of her friends, and the following document comes in at this point:—­