incendiary witch was sentenced, constituted the single exception. In East Anglia there was just enough stir to prove that the days of Matthew Hopkins had not been forgotten. It needs no pointing out that a large proportion of the cases were but a repetition of earlier trials. If a difference is discernible, it is in the increased number of accusations that took their start in strange diseases called possessions. Since the close of the sixteenth century and the end of John Darrel's activities, the accounts of possession had fallen off sensibly, but the last third of the seventeenth century saw a distinct revival of this tendency to assign certain forms of disease to the operation of the Devil. We have references to many cases, but only in exceptional instances are the details given. Oliver Heywood, one of the eminent Dissenters of northern England, fasted and prayed with his co-workers over the convulsive and hysterical boys and girls in the West Riding. Nathan Dodgson was left after long fastings in "a very sensible melting frame,"[2] but the troubles returned and led, as we shall see in another connection, to very tragic results. The Puritan clergymen do not seem, however, to have had any highly developed method of exorcism or to have looked upon cases of possession in a light very different from that in which they would have looked upon ordinary illnesses. Among the Baptists of Yorkshire there was a possession that roused wide comment. Mary Hall of Little Gaddesden in Hertfordshire, daughter of a smith, was possessed in the fall of 1663 with two spirits who were said to have come to her riding down the chimney upon a stick. The spirits declared through the girl that Goodwife Harwood had sent them, and when that suspected woman was brought into the girl's presence the spirits cried out, "Oh, Goodwife Harwood, are you come?--that is well; ... we have endeavored to choak her but cannot," and, when Mistress Harwood left, the spirits begged to go with her.[3] In Southwark James Barrow, the son of John Barrow, was long possessed, and neither "doctors, astrologers, nor apothecaries" could help him. He was taken to the Catholics, but to no purpose. Finally he was cast among a "poor dispirited people whom the Lord owned as instruments in his hand to do this great work."[4] By the "poor dispirited people" the Baptists were almost certainly meant.[5] By their assistance he seems to have been cured. So also was Hannah Crump of Warwick, who had been afflicted by witchcraft and put in a London hospital. Through prayer and fasting she was entirely recovered.