102 EXECUTION OF WITCHES. [CHAP. VII. 



the instant the witch had been taken up. A bottle is preserved, 

 which had been handed in to the Court at the time of the trial, 

 full of pins, with which young women had been tormented. Some 

 of the girls, from whose bodies these pins had been extracted, 

 afterward confessed to a conspiracy. In the evening we walked 

 to the place called Gallows Hill, in the suburbs of the city, where 

 no less than nineteen persons were hanged as witches in the 

 course of fifteen months. 



It is impossible not to shudder when we reflect that these 

 victims of a dark superstition were tried, so late as the year 1692, 

 by intelligent men, by judges who, though they may have been 

 less learned, are reputed to have been as upright as Sir Matthew 

 Hale, who, in England, condemned a witch to death in 1665. 

 The prisoners were also under the protection of a jury, and the 

 forms of law, copied from the British courts, so favorable to the 

 accused in capital offenses. We learn from history that an 

 epidemic resembling epilepsy raged at the time in Massachusetts, 

 and, being attributed to witchcraft, solemn fasts and meetings for 

 extraordinary prayers were appointed, to implore Heaven to avert 

 that evil, thereby consecrating and confirming the popular belief 

 in its alleged cause. As the punishment of the guilty was thought 

 to be a certain remedy for the disorder, the morbid imagination 

 of the patient prompted him to suspect some individual to be the 

 author of his sufferings, arid his evidence that he had seen spectral 

 apparitions of witches inflicting torments on him was received as 

 conclusive. One hundred and fifty persons were in prison await 

 ing trial, and two hundred others had been presented to the 

 magistrate, when the delusion was dissipated by charges being 

 brought against the wife of the Governor Phipps, and some of 

 the nearest relatives of Mather, an influential divine. It was 

 then found that by far the greater number of atrocities had been 

 prompted by fear ; for during this short reign of terror the popular 

 mind was in so disordered a state, that almost every one had to 

 choose between being an accuser or a victim, and from this motive 

 many afterward confessed that they had brought charges against 

 the innocent.* The last executions for witchcraft in England 

 * See &quot; Graham s History,&quot; vol. i. ch. v. p. 392. 



