house, or the parsonage.  It was on hand to meet the contingency created by Corey’s having actually carried out to the last his resolution to meet a form of death that would, if any thing could, cause a re-action in the public mind; and the following stratagem was contrived to turn the manner of his death into the means of more than ever blinding and infatuating the people.  It was the last and one of the most artful strokes of policy by the prosecutors.  On the day after the death of Corey, and two days before the execution of his wife, Mary Easty, and the six others, Judge Sewall, then in Salem, received a letter from Thomas Putnam to this effect:—­

“Last night, my daughter Ann was grievously tormented by witches, threatening that she should be pressed to death before Giles Corey; but, through the goodness of a gracious God, she had at last a little respite.  Whereupon there appeared unto her (she said) a man in a winding-sheet, who told her that Giles Corey had murdered him by pressing him to death with his feet; but that the Devil there appeared unto him, and covenanted with him, and promised him that he should not be hanged.  The apparition said God hardened his heart, that he should not hearken to the advice of the Court, and so die an easy death; because, as it said, it must be done to him as he has done to me.  The apparition also said that Giles Corey was carried to the Court for this, and that the jury had found the murder; and that her father knew the man, and the thing was done before she was born.”

Cotton Mather represented this vision, made to Ann Putnam, as proof positive of a divine communication to her, because, as he says, she could not have received her information from a human source, as everybody had forgotten the affair long ago; and that she never could have heard of it, happening, as it did, before she was born.  Bringing up this old matter to meet the effect produced by Corey’s death was indeed a skilful move; and it answered its purpose probably to a considerable extent.  The man whom Corey was thus charged with having murdered seventeen years before died in a manner causing some gossip at the time; and a coroner’s jury found that he had been “bruised to death, having clodders of blood about the heart.”  Bringing the affair back to the public mind, with the story of Ann Putnam’s vision, was well calculated to meet and check any sympathy that might threaten to arise in favor of Corey.  But the trick, however ingenious, will not stand the test of scrutiny.  Mather’s statement that everybody had forgotten the transaction, and that Ann could only have known of it supernaturally, is wholly untenable; for it was precisely one of those things that are never forgotten in a country village:  it had always been kept alive as a part of the gossip of the neighborhood in connection with Corey; and her own father, as is unwittingly acknowledged, knew the man, and all about it.  Of course, the girl had heard of it from him and others.