Cotton Mather prayed with one of them; but she lost her hearing, he says, when he began, and recovered it as soon as he finished. Four Boston ministers and one of Charlestown held a meeting, and passed a day in fasting and prayer, by which exorcism the youngest imp was "delivered." The poor woman, crazed with all this pother,--if in her right mind before,--and defending herself unskilfully in her foreign gibberish and with the volubility of her race, was interpreted as making some confession. A gossiping witness testified that six years before she had heard another woman say that she had seen the accused come down a chimney. She was required to repeat the Lord's Prayer in English,--an approved test; but being a Catholic, she had never learned it in that language. She could recite it, after a fashion, in Latin; but she was no scholar, and made some mistakes. The helpless wretch was convicted and sent to the gallows. Cotton Mather took the oldest "afflicted" girl to his house, where she dexterously played upon his self-conceit to stimulate his credulity. She satisfied him that Satan regarded him as his most terrible enemy, and avoided him with especial awe. When he prayed or read in the Bible, she was seized with convulsion fits. When he called to family devotion she would whistle, and sing, and scream, and pretend to try to strike and kick him; but her blows would be stopt before reaching his body, indicating that he was unassailable by the Evil One. Mather published an account of these transactions,[3] with a collection of other appropriate matter. The treatise circulated not only in Massachusetts, but widely also in England, where it obtained the warm commendation of Richard Baxter; and it may be supposed to have had an important effect in producing the more disastrous delusion which followed three years after. The Goodwin children soon got well: in other words, they were tired of their atrocious foolery; and the death of their victim gave them a pretense for a return to decent behavior....