At the end of another four weeks the court sat again and sentenced five women, two of Salem, and one each of Amesbury, Ipswich, and Topsfield, all of whom were executed, protesting their innocence. In respect to one of them, Rebecca Nourse, a matron eminent for piety and goodness, a verdict of acquittal was first rendered. But Stoughton sent the jury out again, reminding them that in her examination, in reference to certain witnesses against her who had confest their own guilt, she had used the expression, "they came among us." Nourse was deaf, and did not catch what had been going on. When it was afterward repeated to her she said that by the coming among us she meant that they had been in prison together. But the jury adopted the court's interpretation of the word as signifying an acknowledgment that they had met at a witch orgy. The Governor was disposed to grant her a pardon. But Parris, who had an ancient grudge against her, interfered and prevailed. On the last communion day before her execution she was taken into church, and formally excommunicated by Noyes, her minister.... In the course of the next month, in which the Governor left Boston for a short tour of inspection in the Eastern country, fifteen persons--six women in one day, and on another eight women and one man--were tried, convicted, and sentenced. Eight of them were hanged. The brave Giles Corey, eighty years of age, being arraigned, refused to plead. He said that the whole thing was an imposture, and that it was of no use to put himself on his trial, for every trial had ended in a conviction,--which was the fact. It is shocking to relate that, suffering the penalty of the English common law for a contumacious refusal to answer,--the _peine forte et dure_,--he was prest to death with heavy weights laid on his body. By not pleading he intended to protect the inheritance of his children, which, as he had been informed, would by a conviction of felony have been forfeit to the crown. There had been twenty human victims, Corey included; besides two dogs, their accomplices in the mysterious crime. Fifty persons had obtained a pardon by confessing; a hundred and fifty were in prison awaiting trial; and charges had been made against two hundred more. The accusers were now flying at high quarries. Hezekiah Usher, known to the reader as an ancient magistrate of fair consideration, was complained of; and Mrs. Thacher, mother-in-law of Corwin, the justice who had taken the earliest examinations. Zeal in pushing forward the prosecution began to seem dangerous; for what was to prevent an accused person from securing himself by confession, and then revenging himself on the accuser by arraigning him as a former ally?...