to the edge of the board, and hold out his hand, and make as if he would come, but could not till he was helped off the board....  My wife has offered him a cake and money to come to her; and he has held out his hand, and reached after it, but could not come till he had been helped off the board, by which I judge some enchantment kept him on....  Ever since, this child hath been followed with grievous fits, as if he would never recover more; his head and eyes drawn aside so as if they would never come to rights more; lying as if he were, in a manner, dead; falling anywhere, either into fire or water, if he be not constantly looked to; and, generally, in such an uneasy, restless frame, almost always running to and fro, acting so strange that I cannot judge otherwise but that he is bewitched:  and, by these circumstances, do believe that the aforesaid Bridget Oliver—­now called Bishop—­is the cause of it:  and it has been the judgment of doctors, such as lived here and foreigners, that he is under an evil hand of witchcraft.”

The means used to give this direction to the suspicions of Shattuck and his wife are described in the notice of Bridget Bishop, in the First Part of this work.

Shattuck was a son of the sturdy Quaker of that name who, thirty years before, had given the government of the colony so much trouble, and seems to have inherited some of his notions.  In his deposition, he mentions, as corroborative proof of Bridget Bishop’s being a witch, that she used to bring to his dye-house “sundry pieces of lace,” of shapes and dimensions entirely outside of his conceptions of what could be needed in the wardrobe, or for the toilet, of a plain and honest woman.  He evidently regarded fashionable and vain apparel as a snare and sign of the Devil.

The imaginations of several persons in Shattuck’s immediate neighborhood seem to have been wrought up to a high point against Bridget Bishop.  John Cook lived on the south side of the street, directly opposite the eastern entrance to the grounds of the North Church, on its present site.  John Bly’s house was on a lot contiguous to the rear of Cook’s, fronting on Summer Street.  One of Cook’s sons (John), aged eighteen, testified, that,—­

“About five or six years ago, one morning about sun-rising, as I was in bed, before I rose, I saw Goodwife Bishop, alias Oliver, stand in the chamber by the window:  and she looked on me and grinned on me, and presently struck me on the side of the head, which did very much hurt me; and then I saw her go out under the end window at a little crevice, about so big as I could thrust my hand into.  I saw her again the same day,—­which was the sabbath-day,—­about noon, walk across the room; and having, at the time, an apple in my hand, it flew out of my hand into my mother’s lap, who sat six or eight foot distance from me, and then she disappeared:  and, though my mother and several others were in the same room, yet they affirmed they saw her not.”

Bly and his wife Rebecca had a difficulty with Bishop in reference to payment for a hog they had bought of her.  The following is from their testimony at her trial.  After stating that she came to their house and quarrelled with them about it, they go on to say that the animal—­