The provost-marshal commands silence while he reads the warrant. This formality ended, he replaces it in his belt. Expectation is intense as the condemned are seen to take leave of each other, like people who have done with this world. Then a shiver, like an electric spark, runs through the multitude as the hangman seizes them, pinions and blindfolds them, and, in the name of King William and Queen Mary, hangs them by the neck until dead. Being leagued with Satan, they were denied the consolations of religion vouchsafed to pirates, murderers, and like malefactors. Poor old Rebecca Nurse had been led, heavily ironed, up the broad aisle of Salem Church to be thrust out of its communion. At the scaffold Rev. Mr. Noyes, of Salem, insulted the last moments of Sarah Good. "You are a witch, and you know it," said this servant of Christ. She turned upon him fiercely, "You lie, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink."[148] That few of the martyrs chose to buy their lives with a lie has ennobled their memories for all time. It is written: "If I would but go to hell for an eternal moment or so, I might be knighted." [Illustration: INTERIOR OF FIRST CHURCH.[149]] Other executions took place in August and September, swelling the number of victims hanged to nineteen. Giles Corey was, by the old English law, pressed to death for standing mute when told to plead. John Adams mentions a visit to this hill in 1766, then called Witchcraft Hill. Somebody, he says, within a few years had planted a number of locust-trees over the graves. In 1793 Dr. Morse notes that the graves might still be traced. I felt no regret at their total disappearance. Would that the bloody chapter might as easily disappear from history! FOOTNOTES: [142] Considerable changes were necessary so long ago as 1674-'75, when it became the property of Jonathan Corwin, of witchcraft notoriety. In 1745, and again about 1772, it underwent other repairs, leaving it as now seen. [143] A scene from life in the old Copp's Hill burial-ground at Boston. [144] In the library of Harvard College is a book having the name of Parris on the fly-leaf. [145] She approved Governor Phips's conduct, but advised the utmost moderation and circumspection in all proceedings for witchcraft.--"Manuscript Files." [146] Samuel Sewall, afterward chief-justice of the Supreme Court of the province. [147] Some of the pins said to have been thrust by witches into the bodies of their victims are still preserved in Salem. [148] This incident appears in Hawthorne's "Seven Gables." The tradition is that Noyes was choked with blood--dying by a hemorrhage. [149] The frame of the old First Church of Salem has been preserved. It is now standing in the rear of Plummer Hall, a depository of olden relics. [Illustration: IRESON'S HOUSE, OAKUM BAY, MARBLEHEAD]. CHAPTER XVI. MARBLEHEAD.