save only, on the first day, three morsels of the worst bread; and, on the second day, three draughts of standing water that should be nearest to the prison door:  and, in this situation, such would be alternately his daily diet till he died, or till he answered.  The object of this terrible punishment was to induce the prisoner to plead to the indictment; upon doing which, he would be brought to trial in the ordinary way.  The motive that led prisoners to stand mute in England is stated to have been, most generally, to save their property from confiscation.  The practice of putting weights upon them, and gradually increasing them, was to force them, by the slowly increasing torture, to yield.

How far the English practice was imitated in the case of Corey will remain for ever among the dread secrets of his prison-house.  The tradition is, that the last act in the tragedy was in an open field near the jail, somewhere between Howard-street Burial Ground and Brown Street.  It is said that Corey urged the executioners to increase the weight which was crushing him, that he told them it was of no use to expect him to yield, that there could be but one way of ending the matter, and that they might as well pile on the rocks.  Calef says, that, as his body yielded to the pressure, his tongue protruded from his mouth, and an official forced it back with his cane.  Some persons now living remember a popular superstition, lingering in the minds of some of the more ignorant class, that Corey’s ghost haunted the grounds where this barbarous deed was done; and that boys, as they sported in the vicinity, were in the habit of singing a ditty beginning thus:—­

    “‘More weight! more weight!’
    Giles Corey he cried.”

For a person of more than eighty-one years of age, this must be allowed to have been a marvellous exhibition of prowess; illustrating, as strongly as any thing in human history, the power of a resolute will over the utmost pain and agony of body, and demonstrating that Giles Corey was a man of heroic nerve, and of a spirit that could not be subdued.

It produced a deep effect, as it was feared that it would.  The bearing of all the sufferers at all the stages of the proceedings, and at their execution, had told in their favor; but the course of Giles Corey profoundly affected the public mind.  This must have been noticed by the managers of the prosecutions; and they felt that some extraordinary expedient was necessary to renew, and render more intense than ever, the general infatuation.  From the very beginning, there had been great skill and adroitness in arranging the order of incidents, and supplying the requisite excitements at the right moments and the right points.  Some persons—­it can only be conjectured who—­had, all along, been behind the scenes, giving direction and materials to the open actors.  This unseen power was in the village; and the movements it devised generally proceeded from Thomas Putnam’s