For the thrilling story of these trials and their wretched victims the student should turn to Mr. Upham’s authoritative and popular volumes upon _Salem Witchcraft_. The reader can never forget the tragic fate of the venerable Rebecca Nurse, George Burroughs, a former clergyman of the church in Salem Village, and the other victims. Here we can review only the trial of the Corey family, a fitting climax to this scene of horror. Two weeks after the trial of Tituba and her companions, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Martha Corey, aged sixty, the third wife of Giles Corey, a well-known citizen. She was a woman of unusual strength of character and from the first denounced the witchcraft excitement, trying to persuade her husband who believed all the monstrous stories, not to attend the hearings or in any way countenance the proceedings. Perhaps it was her well-known opinion that directed suspicion to her. At her trial the usual performance was enacted. The girls fell on the floor, uttered piercing shrieks, cried out upon their victim. “There is a man whispering in her ear!” one of them suddenly called out. “What does he say to you?” the judge demanded of Martha Corey, accepting without any demur this “spectral evidence.” “We must not believe all these distracted children say,” was her sensible answer. But good sense did not preside at the witch trials. She was convicted and not long afterward executed. Her husband’s evidence went against her and is worth noting as fairly representative of much of the testimony that convicted the nineteen victims of this delusion: “One evening I was sitting by the fire when my wife asked me to go to bed. I told her I would go to prayer, and when I went to prayer I could not utter my desires with any sense, not open my mouth to speak. After a little space I did according to my measure attend the duty. Some time last week I fetched an ox well out of the woods about noon, and he laying down in the yard, I went to raise him to yoke him, but he could not rise, but dragged his hinder parts as if he had been hip shot, but after did rise. I had a cat some time last week strongly taken on the sudden, and did make me think she would have died presently. My wife bid me knock her in the head, but I did not and since she is well. My wife hath been wont to sit up after I went to bed, and I have perceived her to kneel down as if she were at prayer, but heard nothing.” It is hard to believe that such statements, most probable events interpreted in the least probable manner, should have had any judicial value whatever. Yet it is precisely such a mixture of superstition and stupid speculation about unusual or even daily incidents that was regularly brought forward and made to tell against the accused.