The first manifestation of the revived delusion appeared in 1688, in the family of John Goodwin, a sober and prosperous mechanic of Boston. His children, all of whom were said to be remarkable for “ingenuity of character,” and who had been religiously brought up, and were “thought to be without guile,” suddenly exhibited the most alarming symptoms. One of them, a young girl, had given some offence to an old Irishwoman of bad character, and had been repaid with vigorous abuse and vituperation. Shortly afterwards she began to fall into fits, which were deemed by her friends and neighbors to have something diabolical about them. Soon the same complaint attacked also her sister and her two brothers, and the terrified observers reported that they were all “tormented in the same part of their bodies at the same time, though kept in separate apartments, and ignorant of one another’s complaints.” They were free from trouble at night and slept well. Their afflictions always came on in the daytime and in public. Their diabolical visitants were apparently instructed in theology, and displayed a depraved taste in literature that was intensely scandalizing to the pious Cotton Mather, who interested himself most deeply in the strange affliction of the children. He relates that they would throw the children into a senseless condition if they but looked on the outside of such good books as the _Assembly’s Catechism_ or Cotton’s _Milk for Babes_, while they might read with complete impunity _Oxford Jests_, popish or Quaker books, or the _Book of Common Prayer_.[75] The other symptoms were yet more alarming, physically, if not spiritually. “Sometimes they would be deaf, then dumb, then blind, and sometimes all these disorders together would come upon them. Their tongues would be drawn down their throats, then pulled out upon their chins. Their jaws, necks, shoulders, elbows, and all their joints would appear to be dislocated, and they would make most piteous outcries of burnings, of being cut with knives, beat, etc., and the marks of wounds were afterwards to be seen.” The ministers of Boston and Charlestown came to the house, and kept there a day of fasting and prayer, with the happy result of curing the youngest of the children. The others continued as before; and then, the clergy having failed, the magistrates took up the case. The old woman whose violent tongue had apparently had some connection with the first outbreak of the complaint, was arrested and thrown into prison, and charged with witchcraft. She would neither deny or confess, but “appeared to be disordered in mind,” and insisted on talking Gaelic, though she had been able to talk English before. The physicians examined her, and reported that she was _compos mentis_, and on their report the poor creature was hanged--a serious blot on the usually judicious administration of Sir Edmund Andros; so unlike him that one is inclined to suspect he must have been absent from Boston when this