The truth is you would have me say that goodwife Staples is a witch but I have sins enough to answer for already, I know nothing against goodwife Staples and I hope she is an honest woman. You know not what I know. I have been fished withall in private more than you are aware of. I apprehend that goodwife Staples hath done me wrong in her testimony but I must not return evil for evil. Being still urged and threatened with eternal damnation, she finally burst into bitter tears, and begged her persecutors to cease, saying in words that must have lingered long in their memory, and that still make the heart ache, “Never, never was poor creature tempted as I am tempted! oh pray! pray for me!” The last scene in this New England tragedy was when her poor dead body was cut down from the gallows, and laid upon the green turf beside her grave; and her old neighbors, excited with superstition, and blinded to all sense of shame or unwomanliness, crowded about examining eagerly for “witch signs;” while in the foreground Goodwife Staples, whose lying words had hanged her friend, kneeled by the poor insulted corpse, weeping and wringing her hands, calling upon God, and asserting the innocence of the murdered woman. It is a curious fact that, in an era which did not much encourage the public speech or public appearance of women, they should have served on juries; yet they occasionally did, not only in witchcraft cases such as Grace Sherwood’s and Alice Cartwright’s,--another Virginia witch,--but in murder cases, as in Kent County, Maryland; these juries were not usually to render the final decision, but to decide upon certain points, generally purely personal, by which their wise husbands could afterwards be guided. I don’t know that these female juries shine as exemplars of wisdom and judgment. In 1693 a jury of twelve women in Newbury, Mass., rendered this decision, which certainly must have been final:-- Wee judge according to our best lights and contients that the Death of said Elizabeth was not by any violens or wrong done to her by any parson or thing but by some soden stoping of hir Breath. In Revolutionary days a jury of “twelve discreet matrons” of Worcester, Mass., gave a decision in the case of Bathsheba Spooner, which was found after her execution to be a wrong judgment. She was the last woman hanged by law in Massachusetts, and her cruel fate may have proved a vicarious suffering and means of exemption for other women criminals. Women, as well as men, when suspected murderers, had to go through the cruel and shocking “blood-ordeal.” This belief, supported by the assertions of that learned fool, King James, in his _Demonologie_, lingered long in the minds of many,--indeed does to this day in poor superstitious folk. The royal author says:-- In a secret murther, if the dead carkas be at any time thereafter handled by the murtherer, it will gush out of blood.