of the fingers of one of his hands in the bung, and carry it from the stage head to the door at the end of the stage, without letting it down; and that Lieutenant Richard Hunniwell and John Greenslitt were then present, and some others that are dead.  Sept. 15, ’92.”

Not only the date to this deposition, but its express language, proves that it could not have been used at the trial.  There is another, to the same effect and of the same date, that is, nearly a month after Burroughs was thrown into his grave.  There are others of the same kind.  This stamps the management of the prosecutions, and of those concerned in the charge of the papers, with an irregularity of the grossest kind, which partakes strongly of the character of fraud and falsehood.

When it was found that there was beginning to grow up a want of confidence in “spectre evidence” and the testimony of the afflicted children, those concerned in the prosecutions became alarmed lest a re-action of public sentiment might take place.  The persons who had brought Mr. Burroughs to his death concluded that their best escape from public indignation was to accumulate evidence against him after he was in his grave, particularly on the point of his superhuman strength; and they got up these depositions, and caused them to be put among the papers on file.  Great stress was laid, by those who were interested in damaging his character and suppressing sympathy in his fate, upon this particular proof of his having been in confederacy with the Devil.  Increase Mather said, that, in his judgment, it was conclusive evidence that he “had the Devil to be his familiar,” and that, had he been on the jury, he could not, on this account, have concurred in a verdict of acquittal; and Cotton Mather, feeling the importance of making the most of Mr. Burroughs’s extraordinary strength, gives way to his tendency to indulge in the marvellous, as follows:—­

“God had been pleased so to leave this George Burroughs, that he had ensnared himself by several instances which he had formerly given of preternatural strength, and which were now produced against him.  He was a very puny man, yet he had often done things beyond the strength of a giant.  A gun of about seven-foot barrel, and so heavy that strong men could not steadily hold it out with both hands,—­there were several testimonies given in by persons of credit and honor, that he made nothing of taking up such a gun behind the lock with but one hand, and holding it out, like a pistol, at arms’ end.  Yea, there were two testimonies, that George Burroughs, with only putting the forefinger of his right hand into the muzzle of a heavy gun, a fowling-piece of about six or seven foot barrel, did lift up the gun, and hold it out at arms’ end,—­a gun which the deponents thought strong men could not with both hands lift up, and hold at the butt end, as is usual.”

It is further observable, in reference to the foregoing