agency of the persons then beginning to be unmasked, and brought to justice.  He was prepared to listen to the hints thus thrown out, and was ready to push the prosecutions on with an earnestness in which resentment and rage were mingled with the blindest credulity.  After Mary Walcot had given him a specimen of what the girls were suffering, he walked over, early in the evening, to Mr. Parris’s house; and there Abigail Williams went into the craziest manifestations, throwing firebrands about the house in the presence of her uncle, rushing to the back of the chimney as though she would fly up through its wide flue, and performing many wonderful works.  The next day being Sunday, he preached; and the services were interrupted, in the manner already described, by the outbreaks of the afflicted, under diabolic influence.  The next day, he attended the examination of Martha Corey.  On Wednesday, the 23d, he went up to Thomas Putnam’s, as he says, “on purpose to see his wife.”  He “found her lying on the bed, having had a sore fit a little before:  her husband and she both desired me to pray with her while she was sensible, which I did, though the apparition said I should not go to prayer.  At the first beginning, she attended; but, after a little time, was taken with a fit, yet continued silent, and seemed to be asleep.”  She had represented herself as being in conflict with the shape, or spectre, of a witch, which, she told Lawson, said he should not pray on the occasion.  But he courageously ventured on the work.  At the conclusion of the prayer, “her husband, going to her, found her in a fit.  He took her off the bed to sit her on his knees; but at first she was so stiff she could not be bended, but she afterwards sat down.”  Then she went into that state of supernatural vision and exaltation in which she was accustomed to utter the wildest strains, in fervid, extravagant, but solemn and melancholy, rhapsodies:  she disputed with the spectre about a text of Scripture, and then poured forth the most terrible denunciations upon it for tormenting and tempting her.  She was evidently a very intellectual and imaginative woman, and was perfectly versed in all the imagery and lofty diction supplied by the prophetic and poetic parts of Scripture.  Again she was seized with a terrible fit, that lasted “near half an hour.”  At times, her mouth was drawn on one side and her body strained.  At last she broke forth, and succeeded, after many violent struggles against the spectre and many convulsions of her frame, in saying what part of the Bible Lawson was to read aloud, in order to relieve her.  “It is,” she said, “the third chapter of the Revelation.”—­“I did,” says Lawson, “something scruple the reading it.”  He was loath to be engaged in an affair of that kind in which the Devil was an actor.  At length he overcame his scruples, and the effect was decisive.  “Before I had near read through the first verse, she opened her eyes, and was well.”  Bewildered and amazed, he went back to Parris’s house, and they talked over the awful manifestations of Satan’s power.  The next morning, he attended the examination of Rebecca Nurse, retiring from it, at an early hour, to complete his preparation for the service that had been arranged for him that afternoon.