devoted sons and daughters clung to their parents, visited them in prison in defiance of a bloodthirsty mob; kept by their side on the way to execution; expressed their love, sympathy, and reverence to the last; and, by brave and perilous enterprise, got possession of their remains, and bore them back under the cover of midnight to their own thresholds, and to graves kept consecrated by their prayers and tears.  One noble young man is said to have effected his mother’s escape from the jail, and secreted her in the woods until after the delusion had passed away, provided food and clothing for her, erected a wigwam for her shelter, and surrounded her with every comfort her situation would admit of.  The poor creature must, however, have endured a great amount of suffering; for one of her larger limbs was fractured in the all but desperate attempt to rescue her from the prison-walls.

The Special Court being no longer suffered to meet, a permanent and regular tribunal, called the Superior Court of Judicature, was established, consisting of the Deputy-governor, William Stoughton, Chief-justice; and Thomas Danforth, John Richards, Wait Winthrop, and Samuel Sewall, associate justices.  They held a Court at Salem, in January, 1693.  Hutchinson says that, on this occasion, the Grand Jury found about fifty indictments.  The following persons were brought to trial:  Rebecca Jacobs, Margaret Jacobs, Sarah Buckley, Job Tookey, Hannah Tyler, Candy, Mary Marston, Elizabeth Johnson, Abigail Barker, Mary Tyler, Sarah Hawkes, Mary Wardwell, Mary Bridges, Hannah Post, Sarah Bridges, Mary Osgood, Mary Lacy, Jr., Sarah Wardwell, Elizabeth Johnson, Jr., and Mary Post.  The three last were condemned, but not executed:  all the rest were acquitted.  Considering that the “spectral evidence” was wholly thrown out at these trials, the facts that the grand jury, under the advice of the Court, brought in so many indictments, and that three were actually convicted, are as discreditable to the regular Court as the convictions at the Special Court are to that body.  It has been said that the Special Court had not an adequate representation of lawyers in its composition; and the results of its proceedings have been ascribed to that circumstance.  It has been held up disparagingly in comparison with the regular Court that succeeded it.  But, in fact, the regular Court consisted of persons all of whom sat in the Special Court, with the exception of Danforth.  But his proceedings in originating the arrests for witchcraft in the fall of 1691, and his action when presiding at the preliminary examination of John Procter, Elizabeth Procter, and Sarah Cloyse, at Salem, April 11, 1692, show that, so far as the permission of gross irregularities and the admission of absurd kinds of testimony are concerned, the regular Court gained nothing by his sitting with it, unless his views had been thoroughly changed in the mean time.  The truth is, that the judges, magistrates, and legislature were as much to blame, in this whole business, as the ministers, and much more slow to come to their senses, and make amends for their wrong-doing.