A GOAT FOR AZAZEL
191
her way of tonnenting her victims was to wet her fIDger in her
mouth and stroke these dolls. The Goodwin children were brought
in,
fell to roaring at the sight of her, and when she touched one of
the dolls they flew obligingly into fits.
Cotton Mather sat at the examination and took his endless
notes.
It
was better than he had hoped for.
The witch was invited to name her counsel. "Have you no
one to stand by you?" asked a magistrate.
"I have," she said, and looked pertly into the air. "No,
he's gone!"
She explained, the faithful interpreters said, that she meant
her Prince. This seemed so curious they doubted if she was sane.
Half a dozen physicians came to talk with her. They inquired first
about the state of her soul. "You ask me a very solemn question, I
cannot tell what to say to it." They desired her to repeat the Pater
Noster. She stumbled in some of the passages and excused her bad
Latin
by saying she could not
pronoun~e
those words if they gave
her
all the world. The doctors, too, had read the best authorities on
witchcraft. They decided that she was sane, and a witch.
Cotton Mather, in his own account of this episode, told how
he
posted himself with the interpreters outside her cell, where they
heard her quarrelling with her spectral demon, saying she had
eonfessed to revenge herself for his falseness to her. Mather har·
ried
the fantastical creature, visiting her almost every day as she
lit
chained in her cell. In rambling wild talk she let her fancy go,
ICCOrding to the interpreters: and told of meetings with her Prince
• company with other worshippers of his, though she would not
lIIIle them; and confessed that she knew her Prince to be the
Devil.
Mather told her that her Prince had cheated her badly.
"If
IIIat
he
so, I am sorry," said Bridget. She refused to answer Mome
tl
his questions, explaining that her spirits forbade her to speak.
a Catholic she so feared and hated his heretic prayers that she
illplored him not to pray for her until her spirits gave her leave
II
listen.
She was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. Mather
..Id not rest on this. He went around and collected all the neigh.
Wiood
gossip about her. Festering grievances and old hatreds
_ reopened; a Mrs. Hughes remembered that her small son
at
waked one night crying that a woman was in the room, she had
