But her sons ventured to speak in her behalf. Cotton at once admonished them. The effect of putting them under admonition was to disfranchise them; it was one of Cotton's ingenuities of the sanctuary. The sons out of the way, the mother was cast out unanimously--a punishment much dreaded among the Puritans, who believed that what was thus bound on earth was bound in heaven. It was a ban that forbade the faithful even to eat with her. But the melancholy under which Mrs. Hutchinson had suffered vanished at once, and she said as she left the church assembly, "Better to be cast out than to deny Christ." XXIII. [Sidenote: Omens and auguries.] [Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop's Journal, i, 313, 316; ii, 11, and Short Story of Rise and Reign of Antinomianism.] [Sidenote: Winthrop, i, 316.] [Sidenote: Savage's Winthrop, i, 326.] [Sidenote: Death of Mrs. Hutchinson.] Mrs. Hutchinson and most of her party settled on Rhode Island, where they sheltered themselves at first in caves dug in the ground. Here she again attracted attention by the charm of her eloquent teaching, and some came from afar to hear the "she Gamaliel," as her opponents called her. Such gifts in a woman, and in one who had been excommunicated by the authority vested in the church, could be accounted for only by attributing her power to sorcery. Winthrop sets down the evidence that she was a witch, which consisted in her frequent association with Jane Hawkins, the midwife, who sold oil of mandrakes to cure barrenness, and who was known to be familiar with the devil. At length "God stepped in," and by his "casting voice" proved which side was right. Mary Dyer, one of the women who followed Mrs. Hutchinson, had given birth to a deformed stillborn child. This fact became known when Mrs. Dyer left the church with the excommunicated Mrs. Hutchinson. Winthrop had the monstrosity exhumed after long burial had rendered its traits difficult to distinguish. He examined it personally with little result, but he published in England incredible midwife's tales about it. God stepped in once more, and Mrs. Hutchinson herself, after she went to Rhode Island, suffered a maternal misfortune of another kind. The wild reports that were circulated regarding this event are not fit to be printed even in a note; the first editor of Winthrop's journal felt obliged to render the words into Latin in order that scholars might read them shamefacedly. But Cotton, who was by this time redeeming himself by a belated zeal against the banished sectaries, repeated the impossible tale, which was far worse than pathological, to men and women, callow youths, young maidens, and innocent children "in the open assembly at Boston on a lecture day," explaining the divine intent to signalize her error in denying inherent righteousness. The governor, who was more cautious, wrote to the physician and got a correct report, from which the divine purpose was not so evident, and Cotton made a retraction at the next lecture.