"I was lonesome. Rachel's gone to sleep, Cousin Eunice--were there such things as witches over a hundred years ago?" Eunice glanced at Mother Taft. Witchcraft was a tabooed subject, yet it lingered in more than one imaginative mind, though few would confess a belief in it. "Well, people may talk as they like, but there's many queer things in the world. Now there's that falling sickness, as they call it. Jabez Green has two children that roll on the floor, and froth at the mouth, and their eyes bulge most out of their heads. They're lacking, we all know. But when they come out of the fit they tell queer things that they saw, and I do suppose it was that way then. They do act as if they were bewitched." We know this misfortune now as epilepsy, but medical science in the earlier century did not understand that, nor incipient insanity. "It was very strange," said Eunice rather awesomely. "And Mr. Parris was a minister and a good man, yet it broke out in his family." "But he had them slaves, and in their own land black people do awful things to each other. But it was strange; again, after his wife was accused, Governor Phipps ordered there should be no more punished and all set free, and then the thing stopped." "And it wasn't real witchcraft?" said Cynthia. "Well, I wouldn't undertake to say. There were witches in Bible times and they kept themselves mighty close, for they were not to be allowed to live. And Saul had a hard time getting anything out of the witch of Endor, you know, Miss Eunice." Eunice nodded. They were trenching on forbidden ground.