in the preceding service, Abigail Williams rudely ejaculated, "I know no doctrine you had. If you did name one, I have forgot it." An aged member of the church was present, against whom a warrant on the charge of witchcraft had been procured the day before. Being apprised of the proceeding, Abigail Williams spoke aloud, during the service, calling by name the person about to be apprehended, "Look where she sits upon the beam, sucking her yellow-bird betwixt her fingers." Ann Putnam, joining in, exclaimed, "There is a yellow-bird sitting on the minister's hat, as it hangs on the pin in the pulpit." Mr. Lawson remarks, with much simplicity, that these things, occurring "in the time of public worship, did something interrupt me in my first prayer, being so unusual." But he braced himself up to the emergency, and went on with the service. There is no intimation that Mr. Parris rebuked his niece for her disorderly behavior. As at several other times, the people sitting near Ann Putnam had to lay hold of her to prevent her proceeding to greater extremities, and wholly breaking up the meeting. The girls were supposed to be under an irresistible and supernatural impulse; and, instead of being severely punished, were looked upon with mingled pity, terror, and awe, and made objects of the greatest attention. Of course, where members of the minister's family were countenanced in such proceedings, during the exercises of public worship, on the Lord's Day, in the meeting-house, it was not[ii.9] strange that people in general yielded to the excitement. But all did not. Several members of the family of Francis Nurse, Peter Cloyse and wife, and Joseph Putnam, expressed their disapprobation of such doings being allowed, and absented themselves from meeting. Perhaps others took the same course; but whoever did were marked, as the sequel will show.