in sleight of hand, and in the management of voice and feature and attitude,—­no necromancers have surpassed them.  There has seldom been better acting in a theatre than they displayed in the presence of the astonished and horror-stricken rulers, magistrates, ministers, judges, jurors, spectators, and prisoners.  No one seems to have dreamed that their actings and sufferings could have been the result of cunning or imposture.  Deodat Lawson was a man of talents, had seen much of the world, and was by no means a simpleton, recluse, or novice; but he was wholly deluded by them.  The prisoners, although conscious of their own innocence, were utterly confounded by the acting of the girls.  The austere principles of that generation forbade, with the utmost severity, all theatrical shows and performances.  But at Salem Village and the old town, in the respective meeting-houses, and at Deacon Nathaniel Ingersoll’s, some of the best playing ever got up in this country was practised; and patronized, for weeks and months, at the very centre and heart of Puritanism, by “the most straitest sect” of that solemn order of men.  Pastors, deacons, church-members, doctors of divinity, college professors, officers of state, crowded, day after day, to behold feats which have never been surpassed on the boards of any theatre; which rivalled the most memorable achievements of pantomimists, thaumaturgists, and stage-players; and made considerable approaches towards the best performances of ancient sorcerers and magicians, or modern jugglers and mesmerizers.

The meeting of the council at Salem, on the 11th of April, 1692, changed in one sense the whole character of the transaction.  Before, it had been a Salem affair.  After this, it was a Massachusetts affair.  The colonial government at Boston had obtruded itself upon the ground, and, of its own will and seeking, irregularly, and without call or justification, had taken the whole thing out of the hands of the local authorities into its own management.  Neither the town nor the village of Salem is responsible, as a principal actor, for what subsequently took place.  To that meeting of the deputy-governor and his associates in the colonial administration, at an early period of the transaction, the calamities, outrages, and shame that followed must in justice be ascribed.  Had it not taken place, the delusion, as in former instances and other places here and in the mother-country, would have remained within its original local limits, and soon disappeared.  That meeting, and the proceedings then had, gave to the fanaticism the momentum that drove it on, and extended its destructive influence far and wide.