away the dead cat.  This was all in broad daylight; it being, as Hutchinson testified, “about twelve o’clock.”  The same day, “after lecture, in said Ingersoll’s chamber,” Abigail Williams and Mary Walcot were present.  They said that “Goody Hobbs, of Topsfield, had bit Mary Walcot by the foot.”  Then both fell into a fit; and on coming out, “they saw William Hobbs and his wife go both of them along the table.”  Hutchinson instantly stabbed, with his rapier, “Goody Hobbs on her side,” as the two girls declared.  They further said that the room was “full of them,” that is of witches, in their apparitions; then Hutchinson and Eleazer Putnam “stabbed with their rapiers at a venture.”  The girls cried out, that they “had killed a great black woman of Stonington, and an Indian who had come with her:”  the girls said further, “The floor is all covered with blood;” and, rushing to the window, declared that they saw a great company of witches on a hill, and that three of them “lay dead” there,—­“the black woman, the Indian, and one more that they knew not.”  This was about four o’clock in the afternoon.  This evidence was given and received in court.  It shows the audacity with which the girls imposed upon the credulity of a people wrought up by their arts to the highest pitch of insane infatuation; and illustrates a condition of things, at that time and place, that is truly astonishing.

On the evening before Hutchinson was imposed upon, as just described, by Abigail Williams and Mary Walcot, Ann Putnam had made most astonishing disclosures, at her father’s house, in his presence and that of Peter Prescott, Robert Morrel, and Ezekiel Cheever.  An account of the affair was drawn up by her father, and sworn to by her, in these words:—­

“THE DEPOSITION OF ANN PUTNAM, who testifieth and saith, on the 20th of April, 1692, at evening, she saw the apparition of a minister, at which she was grievously affrighted, and cried out, ’Oh, dreadful, dreadful! here is a minister come!  What! are ministers witches too?  Whence came you, and what is your name? for I will complain of you, though you be a minister, if you be a wizard.’  Immediately I was tortured by him, being racked and almost choked by him.  And he tempted me to write in his book, which I refused with loud outcries, and said I would not write in his book though he tore me all to pieces, but told him it was a dreadful thing that he, which was a minister, that should teach children to fear God, should come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the Devil.  ’Oh, dreadful, dreadful!  Tell me your name, that I may know who you are.’  Then again he tortured me, and urged me to write in his book, which I refused.  And then, presently, he told me that his name was George Burroughs, and that he had had three wives, and that he had bewitched the two first of them to death; and that he killed Mrs. Lawson, because she was so unwilling to go from the Village, and also killed Mr. Lawson’s