fingers, touched Procter’s hood very lightly.  Immediately, Abigail cried out, her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned; and Ann Putnam took on most grievously of her head, and sunk down.)”

Hutchinson, after giving Parris’s account of this examination, expresses himself thus:  “No wonder the whole country was in a consternation, when persons of sober lives and unblemished characters were committed to prison upon such sort of evidence.  Nobody was safe.”  All things considered, it may perhaps be said, that, filled as the witchcraft proceedings were throughout with folly and outrage, there was nothing worse than this examination, conducted by the deputy-governor and council, on the 11th of April, 1692, in the great meeting-house of the First Church in Salem.  It must have been a scene of the wildest disorder, particularly in the latter part of it.  No wonder that the people in general were deluded, when the most learned councillors of the colony countenanced, participated in, and gave effect to, such disorderly procedures in a house of worship, in the presence of a high judicial tribunal, and of the then supreme government of the colony!

Benjamin Gould gave his volunteer testimony without “advisedness,” and quite incontinently.  He brought out Goodman Corey before the managers were quite ready to fall upon him; and he antedated, by a considerable length of time, any such imputation upon Goody Griggs.  It was well for Elizabeth Hubbard to have been in a trance, so that she could not hear the mention of her aunt’s name.  The council seems to have adjourned to the next day, at the same place, when Mr. Parris “gave further information against said John Procter,” which, unfortunately, has not come down to us.  The result was, that Sarah Cloyse, John Procter, and Elizabeth his wife, were all committed for trial, and, with Rebecca Nurse, Martha Corey, and Dorcas Good, were sent to the jail in Boston, in the custody of Marshal Herrick.

The proceedings of the 11th and 12th of April produced a great effect in driving on the general infatuation.  Judge Sewall, who was present as one of the council, in his diary at this date, says, “Went to Salem, where, in the meeting-house, the persons accused of witchcraft were examined; was a very great assembly; ’twas awful to see how the afflicted persons were agitated.”  In the margin is written, apparently some time afterwards, the interjection “Vae!” thrice repeated,—­“Alas, alas, alas!” What perfectly deluded him and Danforth, and everybody else, were the exhibitions made by the “afflicted children.”  This is the grand phenomenon of the witchcraft proceedings here in 1692.  It, and it alone, carried them through.  Those girls, by long practice in “the circle,” and day by day, before astonished and wondering neighbors gathered to witness their distresses, and especially on the more public occasions of the examinations, had acquired consummate boldness and tact.  In simulation of passions, sufferings, and physical affections;