by night.  An originally sensitive and imaginative nature had been wrought into a condition in which her mental faculties were at once enfeebled and exalted.  Besides all this, there were the trials to which her constitution had been subjected by the experiences of maternity so early begun, and the pressure upon her mind and heart of the anxieties and cares incident to a large family of young children.  An accumulation of disappointments, vexations, and consuming griefs, spread like a dark cloud over her life,—­the deaths of her own children, and of her sister Bayley and her children, and of her sister Baker’s children; and, finally, the long-continued, and constantly recurring sufferings, tortures, convulsions, fits, and trances of her daughter Ann, and her servant-woman Mercy Lewis, under, as she fully believed, a diabolical hand.—­These things must have given to her countenance and tones of voice a wonderful impressiveness to all who looked upon or listened to them.  Her eminent social position, her general reputation,—­for Lawson, who knew her well, calls her “a very sober and pious woman,” so far as he could judge,—­the stamp of profound earnestness marked on all her language, the glow which morbid excitement long experienced gave to her expression, must have arrested, to a high degree, the attention of the assembled multitude.  An air of sadness, in the wild ravings of imagination, pervades her testimony.  I present her deposition in full, as one of the phenomena of this strange transaction:—­

“THE DEPOSITION OF ANN PUTNAM, the wife of Thomas Putnam, aged about thirty years, who testifieth and saith, that, on the 18th March, 1692, I being wearied out in helping to tend my poor afflicted child and maid, about the middle of the afternoon I lay me down on the bed to take a little rest; and immediately I was almost pressed and choked to death, that, had it not been for the mercy of a gracious God and the help of those that were with me, I could not have lived many moments:  and presently I saw the apparition of Martha Corey, who did torture me so as I cannot express, ready to tear me all to pieces, and then departed from me a little while; but, before I could recover strength or well take breath, the apparition of Martha Corey fell upon me again with dreadful tortures, and hellish temptation to go along with her.  And she also brought to me a little red book in her hand and a black pen, urging me vehemently to write in her book; and several times that day she did most grievously torture me, almost ready to kill me.  And, on the 19th March, Martha Corey again appeared to me; and also Rebecca Nurse, the wife of Francis Nurse, Sr.:  and they both did torture me a great many times this day with such tortures as no tongue can express, because I would not yield to their hellish temptations, that, had I not been upheld by an Almighty arm, I could not have lived while night.  The 20th March, being sabbath-day, I had a great deal of respite between