such a condition that the family was afraid of him; which story being carried to the town the next day, it was, upon inquiry, understood, that said Goodwife Martin was in such a miserable case and in such pain that they swabbed her body, as was reported.”  He concludes his deposition by saying, that Major Pike “seemed to be troubled that this deponent had not told him of it in season that she might have been viewed to have seen what her ail was.”  The affair had happened “about twenty-four years ago.”  Probably neither Pressy nor the Court appreciated the keenness of the major’s expression of regret.  It broke the bubble of the deposition.  The whole story was the product of a benighted imagination, disordered by fear, filled with inebriate vagaries, exaggerated in nightmare, and resting upon wild and empty rumors.  Robert Pike’s course, in the case of Mrs. Bradbury, harmonizes with the supposition that he was Corwin’s correspondent.

Materials may be brought to light that will change the evidence on the point.  It may be found that Elder Paine died before 1692:  that would dispose of the question.  It may appear that he was living in Salisbury at the time, and acted with Pike and Bradbury, they giving to the paper the authority of his venerable name and years.  But all that is now known, constrains me to the conclusion stated in the text.]

William Brattle, an eminent citizen and opulent merchant of Boston, and a gentleman of education and uncommon abilities, wrote a letter to an unknown correspondent of the clerical profession, in October, 1692.  It is an able criticism upon the methods of procedure at the trials, condemning them in the strongest language; but it was a confidential communication, and not published until many years afterwards.  He says that “the witches’ meetings, the Devil’s baptisms and mock sacraments, which the accusing and confessing witches oft speak of, are nothing else but the effect of their fancy, depraved and deluded by the Devil, and not a reality to be regarded or minded by any wise man.”  He charges the judges with having taken testimony from the Devil himself, through witnesses who swore to what they said the Devil communicated to them, thus indirectly introducing the Devil as a witness; and he clinches the accusation by quoting the judges themselves, who, when the accusing and confessing witnesses contradicted each other, got over the difficulty by saying that the Devil, in such instances, took away the memory of some of them, for the moment, obscuring their brains, and misleading them.  He sums up this part of his reasoning in these words:  “If it be thus granted that the Devil is able to represent false ideas to the imaginations of the confessors, what man of sense will regard the confessions, or any of the words of these confessors?” He says that he knows several persons “about the Bay,”—­men, for understanding, judgment, and piety, inferior to few, if any, in New England,—­that do utterly condemn the said