[Footnote A:  In the innumerable depositions written by Thomas Putnam, he is not so careful to be correct, in his chirography and construction, as in his parish-records.  But, if the reader is inclined to make the experiment, he will find, that, if the above document should be properly pointed and spelled, according to our fashion at the present day, it would read well, and is clearly and forcibly put together.  Spelling, at that time, was phonetic, and it enables us to ascertain the then prevalent pronunciation of words.  “Corsely,” no doubt, shows how the word was then spoken.  “Angury” was, with a large class of words now dissyllables, then a trisyllable.  “Tould,” “spaking,” and many other words above, are spelled just as they were then pronounced.  “Wicthcraft” is always, I believe, spelled this way by Thomas Putnam.  He had not got rid of the old Anglo-Saxon sound of the word “witch,” brought by his father from Buckinghamshire, sixty years before,—­“wicca.”

The condition of medical science and practice, at that period, is curiously illustrated in this paper.  It is plain that the distemper of James Carr was purely in the realm of the sensibilities and fancy; and “doctor Crosbe” is not wholly to blame because his “visek” did not “work.”  A good smart nightmare, with a feeling that he had given a thorough basting to the spectre, in the form of a cat, of the supposed author of his woful and aggravated disappointment in love, was what he needed; and it cured him.  “A posset of sack” was Falstaff’s refuge, from the plight into which he had been led by “building upon a foolish woman’s promise,” when he emerged from the Thames and the “buck-basket.”  Many others, no doubt, in drowning sorrow and mortification, have found it “the sovereignest thing on earth.”  But, as administered by physicians of the Dr. Crosby school, with tobacco steeped in it, it must have been a “villanous compound.”]

But the whole of George Carr’s family did not sympathize in this morbid state of prejudice, or cherish such foolish and malignant fancies, against Mrs. Bradbury.  One of the sons, William, had married, Aug. 20, 1672, Elizabeth, daughter of Robert Pike.  It appears, by the following deposition, which is in the handwriting of Major Pike, that there had been another love affair between the families, leading to a melancholy result, inflaming still more the morbid and malign prejudice against Mrs. Bradbury; but William repudiated it utterly:—­

“THE TESTIMONY OF WILLIAM CARR, aged forty-one, or thereabouts, is that my brother John Carr, when he was young, was a man of as good capacity as most men of his age; but falling in love with Jane True (now wife of Captain John March), and my father being persuaded by [——­] of the family (which I shall not name) not to let him marry so young, my father would not give him a portion, whereupon the match broke off, which my brother laid so much to heart that he grew melancholy, and by degrees much crazed, not being the