generally that they were engaged in a great battle with Satan, one of whose titles was “the Prince of the Power of the Air,” perhaps they chose that spot to execute his confederates, because, in going to that high point, they were flaunting him in his face, celebrating their triumph over him in his own realm.  There is no contemporaneous nor immediately subsequent record, that the executions took place on the spot assigned by tradition; but that tradition has been uniform and continuous, and appears to be verified by a singular item of evidence that has recently come to light.  A letter written by the late venerable Dr. Holyoke to a friend at a distance, dated Salem, Nov. 25, 1791, has found its way back to the possession of one of his grand-daughters, which contains the following passage:  “In the last month, there died a man in this town, by the name of John Symonds, aged a hundred years lacking about six months, having been born in the famous ’92.  He has told me that his nurse had often told him, that, while she was attending his mother at the time she lay in with him, she saw, from the chamber windows, those unhappy people hanging on Gallows’ Hill, who were executed for witches by the delusion of the times.”  John Symonds lived and died near the southern end of Beverly Bridge, on the south side of what is now Bridge Street.  He was buried from his house, and Dr. Bentley made the funeral prayer, in which he is said to have used this language:  “O God! the man who with his own hands felled the trees, and hewed the timbers, and erected the house in which we are now assembled, was the ancestor of him whose remains we are about to inter.”  It is inferrible from this that Symonds was born in the house from which he was buried.  Gallows Hill, now “Witch Hill” is in full view from that spot, and would be from the chamber windows of a house there, at any time, even in the season when intervening trees were in their fullest foliage, while no other point in that direction would be discernible.  From the only other locality of persons of the name of Symonds, at that time, in North Fields near the North Bridge, Witch Hill is also visible, and the only point in that direction that then would have been.

“Witch Hill” is a part of an elevated ledge of rock on the western side of the city of Salem, broken at intervals; beginning at Legg’s Hill, and trending northerly.  The turnpike from Boston enters Salem through one of the gaps in this ridge, which has been widened, deepened, and graded.  North of the turnpike, it rises abruptly to a considerable elevation, called “Norman’s Rocks.”  At a distance of between three and four hundred feet, it sinks again, making a wide and deep gulley; and then, about a third of a mile from the turnpike, it re-appears, in a precipitous and, at its extremity, inaccessible cliff, of the height of fifty or sixty feet.  Its southern and western aspect, as seen from the rough land north of the turnpike, is given in the headpiece of the Third Part, at the beginning