has already been presented in the reports of evidence against her mother; but in those she was called Dorothy, and was reported as testifying that her mother “had three birds, one black, one yellow, and that these birds hurt the children, and afflicted persons.” Such testimony, of course, supported the side of the accusers. The little one’s words were damaging to her mother, and helpful to the mother’s oppressors. But, from some cause, she soon fell under suspicion of belonging to the class of bewitchers. As early as March 3, Ann Putnam saw the apparition of this child; and on the 21st of March, Mary Walcott did the same. This, of course, was regarded as evidence that she was a witch; and on or near March 23d she was arrested, examined, and soon after sent to jail.

Yes, little Dorcas, daughter of mediumistic Sarah Good, not five years old, “looking well and hale as other children,” was definitely, in legal form, accused of witchcraft; was arrested, and brought before the civil magistrates for examination. In presence of the magistrates the exhibiting graduates from the school of “necromancy, magic, and spiritualism”—the afflicted girls—accused the little child of biting them then and there, and “also of pricking them with pins, with pinching and almost choking them.” In proof of all this they exhibited marks upon their flesh, just such in size and form as matched her little teeth Also pins were found under their clothing precisely where they asserted that she pricked them.

Such facts as imprints upon the arms of the girls, corresponding precisely with such as the child’s teeth might make, and the invisible pinchings, prickings, &c., are not outside of nature’s permissions, and therefore were not impossible. Those girls, at their circle meetings, or elsewhere, had obviously become very facile instruments in spiritualism, had become usable by spirits as subjects for impressions, and psychologically induced sensations. From the mediumistic little daughter of a mediumistic mother, forms and forces could be made to emanate which might act upon the plastic mediumistic sufferers in exact accordance with such experiences, and producing such results as the girls described or others witnessed. The senses of the annoyed ones could distinctly perceive that the agonizing forces issued from that little girl. The accusers probably stated only facts which they knew as well as any witness ever knew his facts when describing what his own senses had brought him knowledge of. Whether things seen and felt by the spirit senses be deemed objective or only subjective, they are alike real to the consciousness of the person that takes cognizance of them. The statements of the girls were probably true. The possibilities in heaven and earth, and along where their border-lines come in contact, are not recognized by some historians. There are some persons at this day who hold even as contracting and misleading philosophies, as Cotton Mather and the men of his generation did. Modern wisdom (?) prompts some to discredit any actual occurrence of any extra-marvelous facts—any facts seeming more than natural—and to impeach the accuracy or the truthfulness of any and all who attest to such, rather than admit that the bases of their own philosophies can be improved by expansion. Such persons, when attempting to account for many facts in human history, are, though it may be unconsciously to themselves, like mill-horses tethered to an unchanging center, and made to move within a fixed circumference. Habit soon brings loss of desire, if not of courage, to turn the eyes outward and look upon facts whose producers work from outside the beaten rounds in which some theorists travel. This makes it bad for many facts, such facts as are popping into view through avenues deemed anomalous. There are writers who do their best to enforce upon such facts the Mosaic command, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” But facts are immortal; buried ones often reappear, and demonstrate their own former occurrence.

Two centuries ago, the claim of great marvels to be objective facts was generally conceded. But at that time the hidden workers of wonders were woefully slandered as to parentage: men deemed them all to be both imps of the malignant ruler of the darkest regions of realms unseen, and his emissaries from pandemonium to the abodes of man.

Faith in the genuineness of witchcraft facts, though in Dorcas Good’s day it hid a multitude of sins, failed to make the arresting of a mere infant witch a desirable operation. For some reason the officious marshal, Herrick, sent forth constable Braybrook to encounter and capture man’s great enemy when that wily one had ensconced himself in an infant’s form. But the deputy scavengered up and sub-deputized somebody else to fight that battle for God and Christ. His menial went the needful two or three miles north through the woods to Benjamin Putnam’s house, and executed the daring feat of bringing on his back, or in some other way, a “hale and well-looking” girl of less than five years into court, a culprit because of co-laboring with and being a covenanted servant of witchcraft’s devil! The darkness of delusion which such an arrest failed to illumine must have been thick indeed! But the creed of the day, devil-ward, the creed of the fathers, the creed of Christendom, so deluded the public judgment that it demanded the blood of a witch even though she were an infant.

The condition of the public mind only a very short time subsequent to the irrational, unkindly, barbarous arrest of that child has been depicted by Upham, vol. ii. p. 112, in sentences more graphic, spirited, and eloquent than our own powers could possibly put forth, and differing considerably from what we would essay to give were our rhetorical abilities equal to his. He states that—

“The proceedings of the 11th and 12th of April produced a great effect in driving on the general infatuation.... ’Twas awful to see how the afflicted persons were agitated.... Those girls, by long practice in ‘the circle,’ and day by day before the astonished and wondering neighbors gathered to witness their distresses, and especially on the more public occasions of the examinations, had acquired consummate boldness and tact. In simulations of passions, sufferings, and physical affections; in sleight of hand, and the management of voice and feature and attitude, no necromancers have surpassed them. There has seldom been better acting in a theater than they displayed in the presence of the astonished and horror-stricken rulers, magistrates, ministers, judges, jurors, spectators, and prisoners. No one seems to have dreamed that their actings and sufferings could have been the result of cunning or imposture. Deodat Lawson was a man of talents, had seen much of the world, and was by no means a simpleton, recluse, or novice; but he was totally deluded by them. The prisoners, although conscious of their own innocence, were utterly confounded by the acting of the girls. The austere principles of that generation forbade with the utmost severity all theatrical shows and performances; but at Salem village and the old town, in the respective meeting-houses, and at Deacon Nathaniel Ingersoll’s, some of the best playing ever got up in this country was practiced, and patronized for weeks and months at the very centre and heart of Puritanism, by ‘the most straitest sect’ of that solemn order of men. Pastors, deacons, church-members, doctors of divinity, college professors, officers of state, crowded, day after day, to behold feats which have never been surpassed on the boards of any theater; which rivaled the most memorable achievements of pantomimists, thaumaturgists, and stage-players, and made considerable approaches toward the best performances of ancient sorcerers and magicians, or modern jugglers and mesmerizers.”

The brilliancy, fervor, and literary finish of that description of the public enthusiasm and bewilderment are truly worthy of admiration, while the picture is not, and probably could not be, overwrought. Still we must doubt the competency of the alleged authors of the excitement to perform the bewildering and frenzying acts ascribed to them.

We have heard from of old, and could quasi believe, that mountains in labor brought forth mice. But it is only rarely one has earnestly and fervently sought and striven to entice the reading public to admit conviction that a dozen enceinte mice could enwomb and give birth to a vast and terrific volcano.

One must needs look in wondering astonishment upon that keenness of vision which, at the middle of the nineteenth century, penetrating through mold and debris which have, through a century and three fourths, been gathering over momentous events, sees clearly that they were the genuine offspring of youthful “cunning and imposture,” even while the owner of such vision himself perceived that neither the learned, talented, and keen Deodat Lawson, nor any other one of all the many able and sagacious men who were lookers-on at the amazing feats while they were transpiring, dreamed that the actings and sufferings could have been the results of cunning and imposture. The day of Lawson and his companion observers was too near the facts for any dreams about them. It required a peculiarly plastic modern brain, and the intervening lapse of eightscore years, for the generation and birth of such a dream. The reason of its non-appearance in 1692 is very plain. Known facts then left no vacancy in the brains of that day for storage of the fictions of dreamland.

We return to little Dorcas Good. The creed devil-ward had hoodwinked all eyes. All things were in a terrific and bewildering whirl. Calm reflection and deliberate reasoning upon anything new were impossible. If perchance a mind asked itself whether an infant was competent to bargain with the devil and thence become a witch, it had no time to respond to its own inquiry. In open court, mysterious bitings were perpetrated by the teeth of this little girl, because the marks fitted her set and none other. The marks were made by the accused girl’s teeth. Ocular demonstration, therefore, was proving her to be the devil’s instrument; for otherwise she could not invisibly bite, nor could her teeth be made to bite, those who were off beyond her reach.

Standing upon what we said in the last chapter relating to the passing of hurts through the spirit to its outer body, we hold that spirits may have so applied the spirit teeth of little Dorcas to the spirit limbs of the afflicted girls, as to have left the marks of her teeth upon their flesh.

Woefully did the creed of that time not only permit, but call for the arrest of that infantile girl, solely because, under the operation of natural laws of generation, she inherited properties or capabilities which rendered her, from the time when she was conceived, ever onward, very susceptible to psychological influences. The judges, observing what were but legitimate and necessary outworkings of her inborn properties, being ignorant of their true source and nature, deemed them such a crime that the court sent her to Boston jail a prisoner, there to keep company with the mother from whom her peculiar properties had been derived, by whose milk they had been nourished, and in whose magnetisms they had unfolded. The present century is learning facts which teach that inborn properties and susceptibilities, and not compacts with the devil, constitute witches—some of whom are very lovely. An infantile witch is no great marvel now. Such can be found in many a family, “through whose lips angels speak” to-day, as they did through Emanuel Swedenborg’s when but a child, and who, born in January, 1688, was precisely a contemporary of Dorcas Good.