But the dark shadows of that day of folly, cruelty, and crime, served to bring into a brighter and purer light virtues exhibited by many persons.  We meet affecting instances, all along, of family fidelity and true Christian benevolence.  James How, as has been stated, was stricken with blindness.  He had two daughters, Mary and Abigail.  Although their farm was out of the line of the public-roads, travel very difficult, and they must have encountered many hardships, annoyances, and, it is to be feared, sometimes unfeeling treatment by the way, one of them accompanied their father, twice every week, to visit their mother in her prison-walls.  They came on horseback; she managing the bridle, and guiding him by the hand after alighting.  Their humble means were exhausted in these offices of reverence and affection.  One of the noble girls made her way to Boston, sought out the Governor, and implored a reprieve for her mother; but in vain.  The sight of these young women, leading their blind father to comfort and provide for their “honored mother,—­as innocent,” as they declared her to be, “of the crime charged, as any person in the world,”—­so faithful and constant in their filial love and duty, relieved the horrors of the scene; and it ought to be held in perpetual remembrance.  The shame of that day is not, and will not be, forgotten; neither should its beauty and glory.

The name of Elizabeth How, before marriage, was Jackson.  Among the accounts rendered against the country for expenses incurred in the witchcraft prosecutions are these two items:  “For John Jackson, Sr., one pair of fetters, five shillings; for John Jackson, Jr., one pair of fetters, five shillings.”  There is also an item for carrying “the two Jacksons” from one jail to another, and back again.  No other reference to them is found among the papers.  They were, perhaps, a brother and nephew of Elizabeth How.  There is reason to suppose that her husband, James How, Jr., was a nephew of the Rev. Francis Dane, of Andover.

The examination of Job Tookey, of Beverly, presents some points worthy of notice.  He is described as a “laborer,” but was evidently a person, although perhaps inconsiderate of speech, of more than common discrimination, and not wholly deluded by the fanaticism of the times.  He is charged with having said that he “would take Mr. Burroughs’s part;” “that he was not the Devil’s servant, but the Devil was his.”  When the girls testified that they saw his shape afflicting persons, he answered, like a sensible man, if they really saw any such thing, “it was not he, but the Devil in his shape, that hurts the people.”  Susanna Sheldon, Mary Warren, and Ann Putnam, all declared, that, at that very moment while the examination was going on, two men and two women and one child “rose from the dead, and cried, ’Vengeance! vengeance!’” Nobody else saw or heard any thing:  but the girls suddenly became dumb; their eyes were fixed on vacancy, all looking towards the same spot; and their whole