on, I went thither to see how things were managed:  and finding that the spectre evidence was there received, together with idle, if not malicious stories, against people’s lives, I did easily perceive which way the rest would go; for the same evidence that served for one would serve for all the rest.  I acquainted her with her danger; and that, if she were carried to Salem to be tried, I feared she would never return.  I did my utmost that she might have her trial in our own county; I with several others petitioning the judge for it, and were put in hopes of it:  but I soon saw so much, that I understood thereby it was not intended; which put me upon consulting the means of her escape, which, through the goodness of God, was effected, and she got to Rhode Island, but soon found herself not safe when there, by reason of the pursuit after her; from thence she went to New York, along with some others that had escaped their cruel hands, where we found his Excellency Benjamin Fletcher, Esq., Governor, who was very courteous to us.  After this, some of my goods were seized in a friend’s hands, with whom I had left them, and myself imprisoned by the sheriff, and kept in custody half a day, and then dismissed; but to speak of their usage of the prisoners, and the inhumanity shown to them at the time of their execution, no sober Christian could bear.  They had also trials of cruel mockings, which is the more, considering what a people for religion, I mean the profession of it, we have been; those that suffered being many of them church members, and most of them unspotted in their conversation, till their adversary the Devil took up this method for accusing them.

     JONATHAN CARY.”

The only account we have, written by one who had actually experienced, in his own person, what it was to fall into the hands of those who got up and carried on the prosecutions, is the following.  Captain Alden had probably been from an early stage in their operations in the eye of the accusing girls.  He was meant, perhaps, by what often fell from them about “the tall man in Boston.”  We are left entirely to conjecture as to the reason why they singled him out, as not one of them, we may be quite sure, had ever seen him.  It may be that some person who had experienced discipline under his orders as a naval commander bore him a grudge, and took pains to suggest his name to the girls, and provided them with the coarse, vulgar, and ridiculous scandal they so recklessly poured out upon him:—­

     “An Account how John Alden, Sr., was dealt with at Salem
     Village.