But, whatever the real character of New England witchcraft was, one thing is certain: Indian crypto-paganism was at the root of it. Tituba, the Indian servant of Samuel Parris, the minister of Salem, practised wild incantations and imbued the daughter and niece of her master with her whole system of diabolism. The strange actions of the children excited alarm. Tituba was arraigned as a witch and confessed her incantations; but the devil protects his own. Witchcraft trials began, and Tituba and her fellow Indian slaves, who must have quaked for the moment, saw themselves, not punished, but used as witnesses, until more than a hundred women were apprehended and most of them committed to prison. It did not end there. The gallows was to play its part. Nineteen were hanged, and one Giles Corey was pressed to death. If Tituba invoked her demon to avenge his fallen votaries in her tribe, she was gratified by beholding the victorious whites murder each other at her instance. Neither Tituba nor any other of the Indians, though they avowed their intercourse with the fallen spirits, was tried or condemned for witchcraft. What took place in the Parris household took place in hundreds of others where Indian slaves were kept, as in our time in the South. Thousands of children have there been imbued by their negro nurses with the pagan obeah and voodoo superstitions, as doubtless on the Pacific slope many a mother is horrified to find her child’s mind filled with the grossest heathenism by the Chinese servant, and fondly hopes she has disabused her little one, when, in reality, the faith and the terror then implanted in the child’s susceptible mind will last through life, burned into the very soul by the vivid impression produced. A Catholic may say that the grace of baptism will protect many from this evil; but, alas! to how many thousands of families in this land is baptism a stranger! In them there is nothing to check the insidious progress of evil.