“I do further testify that my said brother was sick about a fortnight or three weeks, and then died; and I was present with him when he died.  And I do affirm that he died peaceably and quietly, never manifesting the least trouble in the world about anybody, nor did not say any thing of Mrs. Bradbury nor anybody else doing him hurt; and yet I was with him till the breath and life were out of his body.”

The usual form, jurat in curia, is written at the foot of this deposition, but evidently by a much later hand; and this leads me to mention the improbability that any testimony in favor of the accused ever reached the Court at the trials.  They had no counsel:  the attorney-general had prejudged all the cases; and his mind and those of the judges repudiated utterly any thing like an investigation.  Every friendly voice was silenced.  The doors were closed against the defence.  Robert Pike, an assistant under the old and a councillor under the new government, endeavored in vain to enter them.

William Carr was a person of great respectability, and bore the appointment, by the General Court, of land-surveyor for the towns in the northern part of the present county of Essex.

The member of the family who—­as stated in the foregoing deposition—­prevented the match, all the circumstances seem to indicate, was Mrs. Ann Putnam.  She perhaps had experienced the effects of a too early marriage, bringing the burden of life upon the constitution and the character before they are mature enough to bear it.  She may have attributed to this cause the troubles and trials with which her cup had been so bitterly filled, and the blasting of the happiness of her youth.  Half deranged, as perpetual excitement from the parish quarrels in reference to Mr. Bayley had made her, she may have become morbidly opposed to the equally early marriage of a brother.  Added to this was the fact that Henry True had married one of Mrs. Bradbury’s daughters, and that Jane True was his sister.  It cannot be doubted that she entertained the same ideas about Mrs. Bradbury as her father and brothers, James and Richard; and, for this reason, also opposed the match of her brother John.  Wishing to be relieved from the self-reproach of having caused his derangement and death, when the witchcraft delusion broke out at Salem Village and she became wholly absorbed by it, as all other deaths and misfortunes were ascribed to it, she avowed and maintained the belief, as some had suspected at the time, that the happiness, health, reason, and life of her brother had been destroyed by diabolical agency, practised by Mrs. Bradbury.

In the state of things long subsisting between the Bradbury and Carr families, we find an explanation of the movement made against Mrs. Bradbury.  Young Ann Putnam may have often heard her unpleasantly spoken of by her mother, and it was natural that she should have “cried out against her.”