While the marshals and constables were in pursuit of Willard, the time was well improved by the prosecutors.  On the 12th of May, warrants were issued to apprehend, and bring “forthwith” before the magistrates sitting at Beadle’s, “Alice Parker, the wife of John Parker of Salem; and Ann Pudeator of Salem, widow.”  Alice, commonly called Elsie, Parker was the wife of a mariner.  We know but little of her.  We have a deposition of one woman, Martha Dutch, as follows:—­

“This deponent testified and saith, that, about two years last past, John Jarman, of Salem, coming in from sea, I (this deponent and Alice Parker, of Salem, both of us standing together) said unto her, ’What a great mercy it was, for to see them come home well; and through mercy,’ I said, ‘my husband had gone, and come home well, many times.’  And I, this deponent, did say unto the said Parker, that ’I did hope he would come home this voyage well also.’  And the said Parker made answer unto me, and said, ’No:  never more in this world.’  The which came to pass as she then told me; for he died abroad, as I certainly hear.”

Perhaps Parker had information which had not reached the ears of Dutch, or she may have been prone to take melancholy views of the dangers to which seafaring people are exposed.  It was a strange kind of evidence to be admitted against a person in a trial for witchcraft.

Samuel Shattuck, who has been mentioned (vol. i. p. 193) in connection with Bridget Bishop, had a long story to tell about Alice Parker.  He seems to have been very active in getting up charges of witchcraft against persons in his neighborhood, and on the most absurd and frivolous grounds.  Parker had made a friendly call upon his wife; and, not long after, one of his children fell sick, and he undertook to suspect that it was “under an evil hand.”  In similar circumstances, he took the same grudge against Bridget Bishop.  Alice Parker, hearing that he had been circulating suspicions to that effect against her, went to his house to remonstrate; an angry altercation took place between them; and he gave his version of the affair in evidence.  There was no one to present the other side.  But the whole thing has, not only a one-sided, but an irrelevant character, in no wise bearing upon the point of witchcraft.  All the gossip, scandal, and tittle-tattle of the neighborhood for twenty years back, in this case as in others, was raked up, and allowed to be adduced, however utterly remote from the questions belonging to the trial.

The following singular piece of testimony against Alice Parker may be mentioned.  John Westgate was at Samuel Beadle’s tavern one night with boon companions; among them John Parker, the husband of Alice.  She disapproved of her husband’s spending his evenings in such company, and in a bar-room; and felt it necessary to put a stop to it, if she could.  Westgate says that she “came into the company, and scolded at and called her husband