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PARTISAN REVIEW
reached
~der
the bedclothes and tried to tear out his bowels. She
said that Bridget, when accused of this, had confessed it was her.
self in spectre. This Mrs. Hughes, under Mather's questioning,
enjoyed great refreshment of memory. A friend of hers had died
six years before, declaring with her last breath that Bridget Glover
had murdered her in spectre. Further-and this is the perfect
Mather touch-the dying woman had warned Mrs. Hughes to
remember this, for in six years there would be great occasion to
mention it.
, The six years were now finished. After sitting in prison for
some months, Bridget Glover was taken out and hanged. On the
scaffold she spoke out clearly and strongly in Irish. The inter·
preter came down' off the ladder and translated the speech to
Mather, waiting below. She said that the children would not
be
relieved by her death, for there were others besides herself had a
hand in their sufferings.
This was truth with unconscious irony. The ones who had a
hand in it published this statement at once, and the Goodwin
children fell into fresh complexities of torment.
Cotton Mather sat in the Goodwin house and urged the
wretched little animals onward. They had begun with a fine holi·
day of rebellion, and now found themselves caught in a horrible
device that really frightened them. They were no longer allowed
to invent their own tortures, but suffered assault from without
Invisible hands smacked them rudely, and large bruises appeared
on their bodies to prove it. On being assured that the spectres had
done it, they said they could see the shadows moving about the
room. Demoralized with terror, they would point them out, and
Cotton Mather would aim a blow at this place. Strangely enough,
the
child who pointed, though his back was turned, would receive
a stout thwack also. Howling, he would speak the names that
occurred, or had been suggested, to him, and Cotton Mather wrote
them down, with the comment that all the persons named had been
since suspected of witchcraft. Invariably, he would observe within
a few days that a suspected woman would be wearing an unaccount·
able bruise on the very part of her body where he had struck at
her spectre a few days previously. He does not explain how he
went about making these discoveries. He failed in gathering
enough evidence to justify the arrest of anyone of them.
